EUnetHorse

INTRODUCTION: Horses are important to Europe. They play an important role in agriculture and forestry (forest cultivation, afforestation) in many Member States and, in addition, European horse breeders, riders and horseracing professionals, as well as European horses, are among the best in the world. But the equine sector is a unique agricultural sector. Although heavily based on agriculture, the new role of horses is in services. Horses can be used for multiple purposes (breeding, sport, racing, tourism, leisure, food production, agricultural uses, Equitherapy, socialization, personal development) and the specificity of each activity leads to sectorization. GOAL OF OUR PROJECT: The overall goal of EUNetHorse is to establish an active multi-actor network across the EU to increase the performance and the resilience of equine farms by widely disseminating best practices, tools and solutions that improve these three aspects: (1) Their socio-economic performance (2) The animal welfare and health on farms (3) The environmental sustainability of the sector. To get this goal EUnetHorse consortium gather 8 EU countries (France, Finland, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Poland) and Switzerland, with a balanced geographical partition in Europe. These 9 countries contain over 4 million equine animals, which represent around 50% of the European Equidae kept in the EU. The four branches, sport/leisure, racing, agriculture and food production, are well represented in each country. EUnetHorse embraces the Multi-Actor Approach all along the project life, each actor working closely with the others: networking specialist, research organizations, advisory services, universities and technical centers, breeders’ associations, farmers representatives and advisory services. All these actors from EUnetHorse are familiar working directly with farmers, identifying and collecting equine farmers’ needs, solutions, and best practices. Let’s go!