Exchanging knowledge, sharing innovation

Action to improve the pig industry

EU PiG is a network of 19 partner organisations from 13 member states, a €2million project running for four years which is funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme.

Led by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) in the UK, the network includes a range of partners from pig producer groups to researchers and economic advisers – connecting pig producers with the latest science, husbandry techniques and technologies.

EU PiG aims to raise the competitiveness of the European pig industry by linking producers and sharing tried and tested best practice and innovations. 

There are four key project themes, currently identified as the main focus areas for pig producers:

• Health management

• Meat quality

• Animal welfare

• Precision production

What we plan to achieve

• Map and consolidate existing knowledge from across the EU

• Facilitate knowledge exchange to help producers drive and adopt innovation on farm

• Bring science led innovations into practice, closing the gap between research and commercial pig production

How we are doing this

Each country has its own Regional Pig Innovation Group (RPIG) as the first point of contact, which links pig producers and other experts to identify emerging issues for EU PiG, and to share knowledge and best practice.

EU PiG wants to hear from producers about which specific challenges to tackle within the four key themes, so the network can respond to emerging issues. There are eight different challenges each year and the network will collate and share knowledge and best practice to help address them. The challenges for 2020 are:

The main way best practice is identified is via the EU PiG Grand Prix, an annual EU-wide contest, with more than 300 producers competing to be one of eight EU PiG Ambassadors, by telling us their ideas and best practice.  The eight producer Ambassadors will represent best practice within the each of the project’s key themes, tackling one of the eight challenges chosen for each year.

Useful sources of information

For information from the agricultural European Innovation Partnership (EIP-Agri) on other products that work to foster competitive and sustainable farming and forestry that 'achieves more and better from less', please visit their website.

The future of innovation in European agriculture and forestry is based on the improved (digital) exchange of best practices between farmers, researchers and advisors from different sectors and member states. EURAKNOS was set up to reinforce the EU agricultural knowledge base by building the blueprint for a data system to enable the farming/rural community easier access to best practices from all EU Horizon 2020 Thematic Networks. To realise this, EURAKNOS has created a network, connecting all 29 Thematic Networks, including EU PiG, to map the stored knowledge within each network and to design a common data system to make the knowledge accessible, searchable, interoperable and reusable for the agricultural innovation community in Europe. For further details, please visit their website.

EUREKA is one of a growing ‘family’ of EU-funded projects that aim to strengthen and improve the flow of agricultural and rural-related knowledge and innovation at European, national and regional level and is very closely linked to EURAKNOS, building on their work on optimising the flow of knowledge from Thematic Networks. EUREKA is developing the 'FarmBook' - a single open source e-platform for collecting and sharing the many different types of end-user material produced by Horizon 2020 multi-actor projects. The project brings together a diverse partnership of experts from 21 organisations in 15 countries to analyse the supply of - and demand for – the practical knowledge and innovative solutions generated in the 120 multi-actor projects that have been funded to-date under the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. For further details, please visit their website.