Sustainable livestock production with good animal welfare and health

Sustainable livestock production

Reaching sustainability in agriculture entails work towards many environmental goals, and livestock production is key to helping us meet the goals of varied agricultural landscape and rich biodiversity. However, to ensure we can meet these goals, it is critical that our livestock production is competitive.

Sweden has good conditions for sustainable livestock production, and animal husbandry on Swedish farms is well known for high animal welfare and health. To ensure long-term competitiveness, the agricultural industry needs to continuously work on developing new knowledge, improving production systems and supporting innovations that increase productivity and profitability.

Applied research and innovation in collaboration with the agricultural industry

We develop and evaluate technology and methods for functional, economic and environmentally sustainable livestock production. We work with systemic solutions for efficient and optimised production and for improved quality of milk and meat. We strive for solutions that provide a good living and working environment for both animals and humans, while at the same time being sustainable from an environmental point of view with minimal negative impact on surrounding land, air and water.

We work with cattle, pig, sheep and poultry production, but also with horses that nowadays are used mainly for sport and recreation.

We focus on the needs of the agricultural industry and our projects cover research, innovation, development and evaluations.  We have a workshop for building prototypes which then can be tested in practice under real conditions on farms that we collaborate with. Our work is often done in close collaboration with the industry, advisory services, farmers and other research groups to obtain broad competence for creating comprehensive solutions.

Examples of research and development areas:

• Meat quality
• Animal welfare at slaughter, e.g. alternative stunning methods
• Sustainable outdoor systems for livestock farming
• Digitalisation, sensors and technical aids for animal welfare and health monitoring
• Animal handling and safe, animal-friendly handling systems
• Work environment and safety
• Indoor mechanization, animal housing systems and construction