The Transnational access (TNA) programme makes available cattle research facilities of SmartCow partners for research by academic or industry colleagues from other (mainly EU/associated) countries. There are 11 major research
infrastructures (18 installations) in 7 countries. The facilities cover a range of cattle types (dairy, beef), different breeds and genotypes and diverse husbandry and feeding systems. The installations include the most advanced animal science
technologies applied to cattle in the fields of nutrition, physiology, ethology and animal husbandry. In addition to subject priorities, we sought to encourage new users, early-career scientists and users without access to facilities in their
region. Total budget was €1.5 million and 10,000 experimental ‘cow-weeks’ were available across the cattle research facilities of Aarhus University, FBN, INRAE, IRTA, SRUC, Teagasc, University of Reading, Wageningen University
and WUR-DLO. Project funding supports the operating costs of facilities running experiments designed by the users, from intensive physiological studies using few animals to large production ones with cows on pasture. Four calls for proposals were made from 2018 to 2020 and we received 47 full proposals, 19 from academic users and 28 from industry users. Proposals were evaluated by at least two independent experts, as well as our ethics committee, and we expect to complete work for 24 of these projects by end of SmartCow in January 2022. Successful proposals were led by teams from Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Macedonia, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Six projects have already completed their work, including studies of diet effects on rumen functioning and methane emissions, diet effects on cheese quality, multi-species sward effects on performance, amino acid nutrition of dairy cows, and sensor technologies for both feed evaluation and assessment of cow stressors.
