CELEGAND Operational Group: New cereals and legumes for Andalusian livestock farming

The Operational Group was created to address the challenges of efficiently obtaining high-quality animal feed in sufficient quantities in Andalusia, given the unique climate of this autonomous community and the shortage of raw materials.

The project aims to obtain animal feed that enhances the nutritional value and safety of animal-based foods for human consumption. They will work together to employ tools based on techniques capable of improving yields in the primary sector. Thus, the use of technological solutions is essential to achieve a sustainable agrosystem: one that provides maximum efficiency in the use of natural resources (soil, water, energy, etc.), detects pests and diseases, controls food safety risks, and guarantees the necessary yields to ensure production profitability. One of Celegand's objectives will be to determine which cereal and legume varieties are most suitable for producing homogeneous batches of silage, hay, and animal feed.

These will assess nutritional quality parameters and their adaptation to climate change and the local climate. The task force will seek new production methods for healthy nutrition for dairy cattle (represented by Covap) and goats (which Los Remedios-Picasat will focus on) by modeling different crops and pursuing greater efficiency, plant health, and improved food safety.

The project proposes the need to use new productive varieties of wheat, triticale, chickpeas, peas, and broad beans, capable of mitigating the effects of climate change due to their lower water demands and greater resistance to pests and diseases. At the same time, they must have optimal nutritional quality and digestibility for livestock feed. In fact, the proposed new varieties boast superior nutritional characteristics to traditional crops and a high level of resistance to most common pathogenic fungi that infect conventional cereals.

Thus, its development will enhance and promote new commercial varieties of the main cereal and legume crops, both for forage crops and for the production of compound feed for animal feed, offering advantages in terms of nutrition, animal welfare, and improved organoleptic properties of milk and meat from cattle and goats. In this way, the breeding material generated will impact not only the agricultural sector in Andalusia, but also the rest of Spain, at various levels. Economically, it will help reduce ruminant feed costs and reduce the heavy dependence on imported feed.

The reduced need to resort to foreign production will not only benefit Spain's trade balance, but will also ensure supply in times of geopolitical tension, as has occurred this season following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the main supplier of raw materials for animal feed. In the environmental area, distances between fields and consumption points will be reduced, allowing for sufficient crop, production, and feed areas in areas close to livestock farms, and which would cooperate with production systems in reducing emissions caused by the carbon footprint. Furthermore, crop rotation with nitrogen-fixing legumes is being implemented to protect the soil and reduce fertilizer use.

In the technological area, the project proposes the use of new digital tools, specifically a platform based on IoT (Internet of Things) technology. It incorporates two types of smart nodes: one for continuous monitoring of environmental variables (relative humidity, soil humidity, temperature, etc.) and the other equipped with cameras and artificial vision. The goal is to improve crop monitoring in two ways.

Thus, on the one hand, the platform will allow for continuous monitoring of its development and facilitate the analysis of the suitability of different varieties. On the other, it will enable more efficient production management by detecting problems and minimizing the use of fertilizers and phytosanitary products.