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Context and challenges

In a context of climate change, agroecological practices offer potential solutions to reinforce agrifood systems. These practices are particularly important to farms that produce raw milk cheeses that are subject to the influence of a wide variety of holobionts and environmental microbiotas, from forage to the final product ingested by consumers.

Scope of the system studied: the food chain from soil to ingested cheese, interacting with humans.

Goals

Our strategy will consist in:

• Comparing agroecological and intensive farming systems and studying their responses to disturbances,
• Reassess knowledge on microbial transfers in a field context and in terms of the diversity of links between human beings and bacteria in the dairy system.

TANDEM gathers a multidisciplinary consortium of skills including agronomy, ecology, microbiology, animal and food sciences, bioinformatics, biostatistics and sociology, while also involving key actors in the cheese sector.

The originality of the project resides in:

• The detailed characterisation of microbial transfers to enable an integrative approach to the microbiota as a whole at the intra-species and functional levels,
• The identification of microbial indicators throughout the food chain to evaluate the impact of changes to practices,
• The deployment of new concepts associated with the contribution of living organisms to these systems.

TANDEM offers new perspectives to better manage transitions of food systems, thus contributing to the three pillars of sustainability (social, economic and environmental) and to global health.

INRAE Partners (to be completed)

Non INRAE partners