COwLEARNING for sustainable beef and dairy supply

The greatest societal challenges include mitigating climate change and adapting to its consequences, ensuring a healthy diet and maintaining cultural landscapes with high biodiversity. A change to a sustainable agri-food industry plays an essential role in addressing these challenges. In Austria, with its high proportion of permanent grassland, cattle husbandry is particularly important. Several aspects of dairy and beef supply are perceived as unsustainable, such as impacts on climate change, loss of land and biodiversity for feed production, animal and human welfare problems on farms and in abattoirs, health risks due to excessive meat consumption or antibiotic resistance. While the problems are attracting considerable public attention, there is no agreement on reasonable targets and we lack information on transition paths to achieve them. Actors from farm to fork are caught in lock-ins and there is a culture of mutual blame. Based on transition management, we aim to break the blame game by initializing a co-learning process that combines expertise from social, environmental, agricultural, and veterinary sciences with the knowledge of practitioners in farming, processing, retail and gastronomy, and of citizen-consumers. The online-workshop for the preparation of the full proposal involved 31 participants and took place on Nov 30 and Dec 1. The meeting pursued three main objectives. First, we co-defined the burning issues in the beef and dairy supply chain including relationships and connections between its main elements. Second, we took a glimpse into our desirable future by asking ourselves how we want to produce, organise and consume beef and dairy in the year 2040. Third, we identified the key-principles of a possible collaboration to design a transparent, entertaining, and effective transdisciplinary process.