Afin d’évaluer et d’améliorer le niveau de bien-être des bovins présents dans les unités expérimentales (UE) INRAE, il a été décidé de réaliser une évaluation approfondie ponctuelle en complément de l’utilisation de grilles de suivi régulier. Ainsi, le groupe de travail SBEA Bovins propose que chaque UE accueille des agents d’une autre UE avec pour objectif d’évaluer et d’établir un diagnostic de l’état de bien-être des animaux au moment de l’évaluation approfondie. Pour améliorer le bien-être des animaux, cette évaluation sera suivie d’une phase de conseil pour identifier les mesures à mettre en oeuvre pour pallier les points faibles tout en maintenant les points positifs. Plutôt que de créer un nouvel outil d’évaluation des bovins, il est proposé d’utiliser les protocoles Welfare Quality®. Cet outil d’évaluation a été développé dans le cadre d’un projet de recherche européen et est devenu un outil de référence. Des adaptations seront néanmoins nécessaires pour couvrir tous les types de bovins présents dans les UE INRAE (les protocoles Welfare Quality® ayant été conçus seulement pour les vaches laitières en lactation, les jeunes bovins à l’engraissement et les veaux de boucherie) et les différents contextes (ex. évaluation des animaux au pâturage) rencontrés dans les UE.

Environmental enrichment, that is making the environment of animals more complex, was first designed to enhance the welfare and cognitive abilities of captive animals, and was more recently applied to farm animals. Enrichments can be sensory, physical, social, occupational, feeding-based, or a mix of these, with a view to improve animals’ welfare. We posit that enrichments share the common factor of providing information to animals so that enrichment is all about providing the animal with a way to acquire information by interacting with the environment. Animals enjoy acquiring information, and the process of acquiring information acts in a way that enables them to better adapt to future environments. This reframed view of enrichment has several implications including prolonging the duration of exposure to an enrichment does not necessarily increase the impact of that enrichment, neutral and even slightly negative stimuli may still be enriching, complex and variable environments are enriching, and the more intensively an animal can engage with the environment, the more it will benefit from enrichments. These implications should be further explored by comprehensive re-analyses of findings from the enrichment literature and/or by dedicated experiments.

This study aimed to study the relationship between milk quality for cheese manufacturing and farm’s environmental impacts in grass-based mountain systems. Beforehand, the multi-criteria evaluation methodology proposed by Botreau et al. and Rey-Cadilhac et al. was adapted to a routine use. Milk quality scores were constructed by weighing traits possibly predicted by spectroscopic analyses currently available in milk labs into 4 dimensions: health, nutritional, technological and sensory. Environmental impact scores were constructed by combining 6 indicators of the CAP'2ER® software in 5 dimensions: greenhouse gas emissions, eutrophication, air acidification, consumption of space and non-renewable energies and ecosystem biodiversity. The study sample included 15 dairy farms located in the French Massif Central mountains. An analysis of variance was carried out to study the effect of system’s types on milk quality and environmental impact scores. A principal component analysis was used to study the relationship between milk quality and environmental impact dimensions scores. No correlation has been established between overall milk quality and overall environmental impact scores. High scores for the nutritional and biodiversity dimensions and low scores for the resource consumption dimension, were associated with farming practices such as a high proportion of grasslands in the usable agricultural area, low stocking rate and low productivity per cow. This demonstrates the importance of defining specific priority objectives, on a farm-by-farm basis, in order to drive changes in agricultural practices. The multi-criteria evaluation model tested here appeared sensitive, but it needs to be tested on a larger scale and in different contexts.

After several years of implementation, the original Welfare Quality scoring model for dairy cows appears to be highly sensitive to the number and cleanliness of drinkers and not enough to the prevalence of diseases, and as a consequence may not fit the opinion of some animal welfare experts. The present paper aims to improve the Welfare Quality calculations for the criteria 'Absence of prolonged thirst' and 'Absence of disease' in dairy cows, so that the results are more sensitive to input data and better fit experts' opinion. First, we modified the calculation of 'Absence of prolonged thirst' by linearising the calculation for drinkers' availability to avoid threshold effects. Second, we modified the calculation of 'Absence of disease' by applying a Choquet integral on the three lowest spline-based scores for each health disorder to limit compensation between health disorders. Third, we performed a global sensitivity analysis of the original and the alternative scoring models. Fourth, we compared the results obtained with the original and the alternative models with eight experts' opinions on two subsets composed of 44 and 60 farms, respectively, inspected using the Welfare Quality protocol and on which experts gave their opinion on the overall level of animal welfare. Results show that the alternative model significantly reduced the 'threshold effects' related to the number of drinkers and the compensation between health disorders. On the first subset, the alternative model fits the experts' opinion slightly better than the original model (P = 0.061). On the second subset, the models performed equally. In conclusion, the proposed refinements for calculating scores are validated since they significantly reduced 'threshold effects' and the influence of measures related to drinkers. It also reduced the compensation between health disorders by considering only the three lowest scores and thus increasing the influence of measures related to health disorders, and slightly improve at overall score level the accordance with experts' opinion.

There are time-tested assessments for the environmental and economic aspects of sustainability. Its societal aspect has mainly been approached through the assessment of animal welfare. However, the intrinsic quality of milk is seldom taken into account. We developed a participatory construction method for the overall assessment of intrinsic milk quality in its different dimensions (sensory, technological, nutritional and health), according to the fate of the raw milk. Two assessment models were developed, for semi-skimmed standardized ultra-high temperature (UHT) milk and for pressed uncooked non-standardized raw milk cheese. They were constructed by a participatory approach involving experts in the dairy sector with the aim to obtain a diagnostic tool that could be used in the field to help farmers to manage the quality of their milk (by prioritizing improvements on major problems). They were shaped from prerequisite specifications (limited costs and time of application, desire to obtain a transparent tool with all the steps kept visible) and current technical and scientific knowledge. They were based on indicators obtained from raw bulk tank milk analyses (30 for UHT milk and 50 for cheese assessments), which were then aggregated into criteria, principles, dimensions and overall intrinsic quality at farm level. The assessment models had parts in common, for example, same four dimensions, common indicators for health and nutritional dimensions. They also had process-specific features: units chosen, criteria, indicators and weightings in relation to the final product specifications. For instance, sensory and technological dimensions are more complex and preponderant in the cheese assessment (three principles for cheese vs one for UHT milk in both dimensions). Another example is the lack of microbial pathogens (as potential health risk for consumer) in the UHT milk assessment because of pasteurization. The assessment models then underwent a sensitivity analysis and an application in 30 farms in indoor and grazing periods to finally obtain overall UHT milk and cheese quality scores at a 1-year level. The tool was found to be applicable at farm level. However, we observed low overall quality scores with a narrow dispersion, characteristic of a severe evaluation. Even so, the assessment models showed up seasonal differences of the UHT milk and cheese quality at both overall and dimensional levels. In the light of new scientific knowledge and future quality objectives, these are adaptable to other dairy products allowing for their specific features.

Background The border area between French Guiana and Brazil is an active HIV-transmission zone. The aim of the present study was to describe HIV knowledge, risk and the level of stigma among inhabitants of this border area. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted among 621 inhabitants over 18 years of age in the border cities of Saint-Georges-de-l’Oyapock in French Guiana and Oiapoque in Brazil. It was conducted between October 2017 and February 2018. An anonymous standardized questionnaire was filled out by culturally-trained mediators, then analyzed using STATA 12. Results Almost half (45.9%) of the individuals had a low education level. Participants whose native language was Portuguese or French demonstrated better HIV knowledge than other populations, notably native Amerindian and creole-speaking people. HIV risk behavior was more frequent in men and in younger age groups. People with good HIV knowledge reported having performed more HIV tests in the last year than participants with poor knowledge. The stigma level was high and reported in 74.8% of respondents. Conclusions These results illustrate the need for initiatives to improve HIV prevention among autochthonous populations on both sides of this border area. Cross-border collaboration on health policies could produce common key messages adapted to the education level and multi-linguistic populations who live in this area.

This data article contains annotation data characterizing Multi Criteria Assessment (MCA) Methods proposed in the agri-food sector by researchers from INRA, Europe's largest agricultural research institute (INRA, http://institut.inra.fr/en). MCA can be used to assess and compare agricultural and food systems, and support multi-actor decision making and design of innovative systems for crop production, animal production and processing of agricultural products. These data are stored in a public repository managed by INRA (https://data.inra.fr/; https://doi.org/10.15454/WB51LL).