Maria Devant
Maria Devant has a solid background in R&D in Swine and Ruminant Production. Over the last 15 years, she has focused her scientific career in beef production improving feed efficiency and enhancing economic returns while minimising environmental impact, improving animal welfare, and offering high-quality products to the consumers through research and innovation. To achieve this goal the creation and leadership of the Beef Innovation Table has been crucial, in this annual meeting 12 representatives of the whole production chain propose and set priorities of the research topics, and in this forum we also connect them the new societal demands that are coming and that they need to be prepared (like antibiotic user reduction). Her expertise is nutrition and management, and in case a topic needs the expertise in another area we find collaboration within IRTA or outside IRTA to solve it. In the last 5 years she have focused my research in 2 topics: strategies to improve calf vitality and modulation of behavior and stress through nutrition (gut-brain axis). As a result of this work, I have published more than 49 peer-reviewed articles in major international journals (Quartile 1). These publications have a total of 1119 citations yielding an H-index of 21. Besides, in the last 10 years I have presented a total of 80 communications and posters in scientific congresses. Along with this research activity she is head of the Ruminant Production Program (since 2016) and Animal Nutrition Program (since 2021) and member of the Strategic and Scientific Committee at IRTA (since 2019), in these positions where team science needs to be successful, two skills like i) openness to different perspectives and being able to conceptualize the big picture, ii) and being able to uniting people around a common mission are needed.
Juliana Mergh Leão
Juliana Mergh Leão, DVM, PhD, is Technical Manager and RD for SCCL in Europe, Israel and Brazil. Her research background is in calf nutrition and management with special focus on calf feed efficiency, residual feed intake, thermography, and energy expenditure. After her postgraduate, she moved from Brazil to the Netherlands to join SCCL. Juliana is currently responsible for educating distributors, farmers, vets, and people who are involved with the colostrum management of calves, helping them to raise better calves to become productive cows in the future. She is also involved in small ruminant projects on new uses and applications of bovine colostrum in different species.
James Hogge
James Hogge is a sociology researcher at the Institut de l'Elevage in Paris. He is currently working on the specificities of women's access to and practice of livestock farming professions. His work focuses in particular on gendered representations of male and female roles in agriculture, the consequences of the division of professional and domestic tasks, the professional and social integration of women in livestock farming, and the links between gender and agricultural equipment.
Imke Edebohls
M.Sc. agr. Imke Edebohls has been advising farmers in various organisations in northern Germany since 1997. The focus of her work is on business analyses, calculating investments and new technologies as well as advising cattle farms on production technology. She also specialises in providing socio-economic advice to farms during conversion processes. Since 2019, she has also been working in applied agricultural research at the Thünen Institute in addition to agricultural consulting. Here she has expertise in the calculation of innovative production methods in aquaculture (GAIN) and husbandry methods in cattle farming (InnoRind) as well as in social research as part of the study on the "Living situation of women on farms in Germany".
Taija Kaarlenkaski
Taija Kaarlenkaski, PhD., is an Academy research fellow at the University of Eastern Finland. She also holds the title of docent (associate professor) in cultural animal studies at the University of Turku. She has a background in folklore studies and human-animal studies, and she has specialized in her research in human-cattle relationships and the history and technologization of Finnish dairy husbandry. Her current research project explores the changing meanings of milk production and consumption in Finland from the 1950s to the present day.
Anneke Talsma
Anneke Talsma joined Alta Genetics as an International Sales Manager in February 2016, responsible for Alta’s business developments in Eastern Europe, Turkey, and Africa. Since April 2021, she has been the sales team leader of the Alta International team which covers wholesale markets in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Originally from the Netherlands, she grew up in Texas, USA where her family milks 4500 dairy cows. The herd started as Holsteins and now is primarily Jerseys.
Anneke obtained her Bachelors degree from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX studying International Business, Economics, and Spanish. To gain more knowledge about bovines, Anneke obtained the Dairy Certification through the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. She also furthered her business acumen by obtaining a Masters in Business Administration from Texas Christian University.
Anneke has gained practical experience working various positions on large dairy farm operations throughout the US – Texas, Indiana, Idaho – youngstock, breeding, milking, feeding, transition cows, hospital – sick cows, and management of the total dairy operation. These farms ranged in size from 4000 milking cows to 26000 milking cows. She enjoys sharing this knowledge and experience to advise customers in how they can advance the genetics and management levels in their dairy farm operations to achieve profitable and sustainable success.
Kerli Mõtus
Kerli Mõtus obtained DVM degree in the Estonian University of Life Sciences (EULS) in 2006 and PhD in 2012. Between years 2016-2018 she had post-doctoral studies in Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Kerli Mõtus works as associate professor in dairy herd health in the EULS. Her research work is focused mostly on different aspects of dairy herd health e.g., revealing risk factors for dairy calf and cow on-farm mortality, cow culling and longevity as well as calf respiratory disease etiology, prevention of calf diseases etc. She is also consulting Estonian dairy producers in calf diseases and advises on implementation of herd health management programmes and control of infectious diseases.
Catarina Svensson
Catarina Svensson, DVM, PhD is professor in bovine herd health management at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden. Her research areas have varied throughout her career but calf health and its long-term consequences have been a recurrent theme. Currently her main research focus is on methodology in veterinary herd health management and barriers to on-farm implementation of health and welfare promotion actions on dairy farms. Her recent projects in calves address implementation of biologically normal milk allowances to calves.
