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The urgency to reduce the use of antimicrobials in the livestock sector has become part of the European Farm-to-Fork agenda. To develop innovations and pave the way for prudent antimicrobial use (AMU), the H2020 four-year-long ROADMAP project implemented the approach of Living Labs (LL). It stands for a process that involves a heterogeneous group of stakeholders in co-creation, testing and evaluating innovations in real-world contexts. The use of LLs has gained momentum to accelerate transformation of European agriculture by developing innovations through end-user (farmer) involvement. However, the LL-approach is new in the livestock sector. During the project, 11 LLs were established in seven European countries, each with its own settings but linked to the project's overarching goals. Some LLs developed a common understanding of AMU within the sector or between farmers and veterinarians, while others focussed on policy development or better management practices. During the ROADMAP project, we learned about the potential and limitations of the LL approach in the livestock sector. Using the approach of social innovations, we developed recommendations on how to realise the potential of LLs in a research context to meet the goals of the EU Farm-to-Fork strategy of prudent AMU.

Les diverses politiques et initiatives visant à réduire l'utilisation des antimicrobiens dans la production animale en Europe au cours des dix dernières années ont été couronnées de succès. Dans de nombreux pays, les objectifs de réduction ont été atteints (une réduction des ventes d'antimicrobiens comprise entre 30 et 50 %). Mais lorsqu'il s'agit d'objectifs à plus grande échelle ou à plus long terme, notamment ceux visant à passer à une agriculture plus durable ou plus résiliente, le tableau est beaucoup moins clair. Le succès de la lutte contre la résistance aux antimicrobiens (RAM) ne doit pas masquer le fait qu’à ce jour, peu de progrès ont été réalisés sur les questions de transition. Les formes intensives et industrielles de production animale sont maintenues et parfois renforcées par les stratégies développées pour réduire l'utilisation des antimicrobiens. La réduction et le remplacement des antimicrobiens ont constitué une étape importante, mais la réflexion n'a pas été liée à la remise en cause du système de production, comme le suggéraient en premier lieu les politiques européennes. Il est désormais essentiel de lier les efforts actuels à des changements de grande envergure et à des innovations de rupture. La RAM est un problème parmi tant d'autres. Tous doivent être abordés globalement grâce à une transition vers des formes d'agriculture moins intensives, moins industrielles et plus soucieuses de leur impact sur la santé, l'environnement et la société.

Die verschiedenen politischen Maßnahmen und Initiativen der letzten zehn Jahre zur Verringerung des Einsatzes antimikrobieller Mittel in der europäischen Tierhaltung waren erfolgreich. In vielen Ländern wurden die Reduktionsziele erreicht (Rückgang der Verkäufe antimikrobieller Mittel um 30-50 %). Geht es jedoch um größere oder längerfristige Ziele, nämlich die Umstellung auf eine nachhaltigere oder widerstandsfähigere Landwirtschaft, ist die Situation weit weniger eindeutig. Der Erfolg im Kampf gegen antimikrobielle Resistenzen (AMR) darf nicht darüber hinwegtäuschen, dass bei der Umstellungsthematik bisher kaum Fortschritte erzielt wurden. Intensive und industrielle Formen der Tierhaltung werden durch die Strategien, die zur Verringerung des Einsatzes antimikrobieller Mittel entwickelt wurden, aufrechterhalten und manchmal sogar verstärkt. Die Reduzierung und Substitution antimikrobieller Mittel waren ein wichtiger Schritt, aber diese Überlegungen wurden nicht mit dem Überdenken des Produktionssystems verknüpft, wie es die europäische Politik ursprünglich vorgeschlagen hatte. Es ist jetzt entscheidend, die derzeitigen Bestrebungen mit weitreichenden Veränderungen und bahnbrechenden Innovationen zu verbinden. AMR ist ein Problem von vielen anderen. Sie müssen weltweit angegangen werden, und zwar durch die Umstellung zu einer weniger intensiven, weniger industriellen und stärker auf ihre Auswirkungen auf Gesundheit, Umwelt und Gesellschaft bedachten Landwirtschaft.

The intensification of livestock farming reshaped the epidemiological, economic and environmental landscape of production systems. With the resulting increase in disease pressure, farmers turned to readily available and cost-efficient tools to help manage animal health and even increase productivity – antimicrobials. Growing concerns around antimicrobial resistance (AMR) have prompted regulatory and private initiatives to curtail antimicrobial use (AMU) in livestock. The latter indicates that farmers/livestock industry are taking some ownership of the problem and playing a key role in the solution. In fact, recent research has found that farmers are willing to adjust farming practices if this does not affect financial viability of their businesses. However, our scoping literature review found that information is lacking or insufficient for farmers to make these decisions. It is also vital to understand the extent to which farm-level decisions are producing negative externalities, and what needs to be changed to ensure societal optimum. While advocating for a sustainable reduction in AMU in livestock production, it is important to provide adequate information on the alternatives to their application in managing animal health and welfare. Evidence on the economic, productive and/or epidemiological benefits of such alternatives, when compared to the current situation, are crucial if farmers are to change their production practices with regards to AMU.

As part of the transition to more sustainable agriculture, it has been observed that changes leading to low-to-moderate sustainability, including optimisation and substitution of production processes, are often preferred to more radical changes leading to deep sustainability, i.e. redesigning production processes. In this light, we sought to explore whether this was also the case for antimicrobial use in farm animal production, which has changed over the past decade in an effort to decrease the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance in humans and animals. To explore this, a qualitative approach was used to 1) identify interventions in 12 animal production sectors across 9 European countries, 2) characterise them, and 3) estimate their potential to contribute to the ‘reduce’, ‘replace’ and ‘rethink’ approaches by stimulating the adoption of behaviours related to these strategies. Our findings revealed that while some interventions were identified to potentially contribute solely to one or two of the approaches, the majority were deemed capable of contributing to all three. However, for these interventions, our data suggest that their actual impact, as implemented, was confined to the ‘reduce’ and ‘replace’ approaches, an observation for which we put forward several hypotheses. In addition, policy implications are drawn.

This article considers how different ‘triggers' contribute to changes in the use of antimicrobials. Drawing on the Triggering Change model, the article suggests that the use of antimicrobials is path dependent: economically, socially and culturally invested in maintaining a steady trajectory, with incremental changes. Triggering events – such as farm succession, financial crisis, or disease outbreak – are required to break these dependencies and stimulate transitions to new farming trajectories. The article investigates which triggering events are significant in the context of responsible antimicrobial usage, in three European countries, spanning the beef, dairy, poultry and pig sectors. Results demonstrated that major reductions in antimicrobial use are often part of larger transition processes. Triggers led to major changes on farm which included reduction in antimicrobial use amongst other changes. When antimicrobial change occurred in isolation, it was typically in response to legislation, and progressed incrementally over time. To achieve major changes in antimicrobial use thus requires policies which work with trigger events such as supporting training of successors, and enabling farmers who have experienced major disease outbreaks to ‘build back better’. Working to shape what farmers understand as ‘good farming’ through education, regulations and benchmarking, are also important options.

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) will introduce stringent due diligence requirements on the sale of seven major agricultural commodities in the EU with the objective of limiting deforestation in the producing countries. The greatest impact is likely to be in cocoa and coffee where the EU, and Europe more widely, are responsible for a large share of world consumption; and possibly also in palm oil which has seen substantial deforestation. Commodity supply chains are complex. In particular, crops produced by smallholder farmers are aggregated into larger packets prior to export. Tracking the deforestation status of these aggregated packets will be a major and potentially costly undertaking. This will result in the restructuring of supply chains, favouring large farms over smallholdings and international trading companies over nationally-based exporters. These developments are seen by some producing country governments as imperialistic. EUDR-compliant supplies will earn a premium and this will raise the prices faced by European consumers. Producers who are able to comply will benefit from the premium but will bear the compliance cost. Overall, there will be a net pecuniary loss. Benefits to deforestation will only emerge as new planting takes place and will depend on whether other consuming countries introduce similar legislation. I estimate that, despite the reduction in deforestation embodied in EU imports, the overall impact on deforestation will be minor but with high associated compliance costs.

Digital innovations can increase resilience and sustainability of food businesses due to for instance increasing efficiency, reducing pollution or improving transparency about production conditions. However, much of the research on this topic has been done at the primary production level, i.e. on technology impacts on farms, or remains at an ex-ante case study level when looking at digital technology impacts in downstream food businesses. Therefore, ex-post impacts of digital technologies after their adoption are largely unknown.

We here argue that this knowledge gap arises from the fact that we lack single company data (i.e. micro-data) on the adoption of digital technologies in food businesses. Only with this information can actual impacts of these technologies be assessed using causal inference methods. As a way forward, we highlight a unique dataset of digital technology adoption among Dutch downstream food businesses that is available for research purposes. We show that digital technologies already have a considerable market penetration in the Netherlands. Therefore, we urge the scientific community and governmental statistical offices to collect and make available similar data globally and make use of the already existing data. Such impact assessments will inform and accelerate the transition towards more sustainable and resilient food value chains.

Advocacy for a shift from an individual farm-level to a landscape-level approach in agri-environmental policy is a focal point in the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. Such a shift aims to address spatial mismatches between ecological processes and targeted environmental outcomes, and to harness potential ecological gains from spatial coordination. However, there remains limited understanding of how to design effective mechanisms aimed at encouraging coordination among landholders. Do landscape configurations influence the effectiveness of coordination mechanisms? This article aims to assess the effectiveness of alternative coordination mechanisms incorporated in the design of a conservation auction across alternative landscape configurations, that is, in terms of the spatial relationship between some measure of environmental benefit – such as wild bird species diversity – and the profitability of farmland. These mechanisms include landholder-to-landholder communication, disclosure of spatial environmental scoring rules, and the Agglomeration Bonus. We used lab experiments to evaluate these options. Our results suggest that there is no panacea for promoting landscape-level environmental outcomes. Communication proves capable of significantly facilitating coordination, whilst information disclosure policies can serve as an effective coordination mechanism in multiple landscape types. By contrast, the Agglomeration Bonus was only found to effectively promote coordination in a positively correlated landscape type. It leads to lower cost-effectiveness in all landscape types.