newcap

The main aim of the project is to enhance the sustainability of goat farms and their industry by improving the attractiveness of the farming professions, consolidating employment and creating a la...

The main aim of the project is to enhance the sustainability of goat farms and their industry by improving the attractiveness of the farming professions, consolidating employment and creating a lasting network of the main European goat regions. The networking of these players at European level is intended to meet this general objective, i.e. : - to develop measures to enhance the socio-economic attractiveness of livestock farming, - to acquire tools for adapting livestock farming practices towards greater sustainability, - to understand and respond to societal expectations and purchasing behaviour, The specific objectives that meet the general objective of the Newcap project are : - to bring together breeders and players in the industry to strengthen professional breeders' organisations at European level by creating a sustainable goat network. - to capitalise on diagnoses, bibliographical resources and technical practices in order to share tools and methodologies that will increase the skills of our target audience, - to collectively design studies, training, support and communications in Europe for the benefit of all,

In line with our needs and objectives, the activities we have implemented have aimed to : 1/ get to know each other and bring us together 2/ carry out shared diagnoses of our problems 3/ start to design development and training tools 4/ outline the outlines of a European network of goat farmers and their partners. These activities were of several kinds: - Organising visits to our three main goat regions - Three visits were organised in December 2022 in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, May 2023 in Andalusia and October 2023 in mainland Greece, where we held meetings and made field visits to goat farms (farm and dairy), agritourism farms, dairies and research, development and training centres to get to know each other, - Organise videoconferences at the interface of on-site meetings to prepare and build, - Drafting and capitalising on inter-regional diagnostic and summary information on our themes - Design summary sheets and develop internal and external communication tools to plan for the future.

The videoconference meetings, as well as the meetings of the three mobility projects and the field visits (farms, cheese dairies, laboratories, research and development centres), have enabled us to get to know each other and to make diagnoses by work theme. These diagnoses are an important outcome of our Erasmus Newcap project. They form the basis for building our European network of the main goat regions. Our exchanges and visits have enabled our project to be finely structured into 4 areas and several sub-areas (we have considered communication to be a separate aspect of our project). The Newcap project areas : 1 - Employment: setting up, passing on and training 2 - Ensuring the sustainability of livestock farming activities in response to society's expectations 3 - Controlling production systems for a wide range of goat products and goat sectors 4 - Ensure the governance of R&D&P networks and resources, communicate and disseminate. We have a website www.newcap-erasmusplus.eu and are building up a network of reference and host breeders, training and research centres, development: identification of a network of resource people,