SPACE 2013, which will take place September 10-13 at the Parc Expo of Rennes Airport in France, will focus on the difficult environment for livestock production in France.
French poultry and pork producers and processors are undergoing two major handicaps that weigh heavily on their competitiveness:
- The great difficulty of passing on the increase in production costs for farmers onto sales prices, due to pressure from supermarkets.
- The distortions of social, fiscal and environmental competition, which are being analyzed to determine whether dumping from some European countries is happening. Such dumping would enable the countries to produce at lower cost, and thus gain market share globally and even in France.
For example, despite maintaining its status as a leading poultry producer in Europe, France saw its market increasingly flooded with imported products, which are 40 percent of the chickens consumed.
The need to modernize farms is also important in the context of open global markets, given the growing food needs of a population that will increase to 9 or 10 billion people.
SPACE's three-tier platform
SPACE 2013's platform will be organized into three areas: poultry, swine and manure.
Poultry: In order to modernize poultry farms, a multitude of equipment and materials that can be used in insulation, ventilation, reduction of energy cost, recovery of waste, etc., will be profiled.
Swine: Similar to poultry, swine building and equipment presentations will highlight solutions for obtaining better performance from a technical, environmental and energy standpoint.
Manure: The central part of the platform will focus on manure application equipment. Today, in context of the high cost of raw materials, optimizing the management of waste as soil protection is paramount.
Visit local farms
SPACE will offer visits to local French farms and agribusiness units, which will be available to international visitors September 10-12. Tours will cover the feed, swine, bovine and poultry industries with demonstrations in robotics, genomic selection and breeding. These visits will be at the Club International, in collaboration with the travel agency AGRI PASS and with support from French agriculture trade association, ADEPTA. For more information or to register for the farm tours, visit uk.space.fr/visitor/farm-visits.aspx.
SPACE 2013 app
SPACE is offering its visitors and exhibitors the opportunity to get information and plan their visit to SPACE by using a free app available on iPhone and Android. Visit uk.space.fr/visitor/mobile-application.aspx for more information.
