Ruminants Systems and One Health (RUMIOH)

Group photo
Research Group for Ruminant Systems & One Health on 25 March 2025. Missing in the picture: Nadja Alsted, Røsle Dyre and Lars Pedersen.

Research Group for Ruminant Systems & One Health (RUMIOH) is an interdisciplinary group of researchers, educators, and students with a shared interest in understanding ruminant lives and their ecological roles and interactions in different systems. We mainly work on cattle, and sometimes sheep and goats, and deer and bison. We also collaborate with groups working on other animal species, such as pigs, poultry, and companion animals. We also work with interactions between animals, humans and the environment including human perception, influence and decision-making in systems associated with ruminants.

We study everything from the rumen microbiome and its enzymes, over health and welfare at the individual animal and population levels, to the broader systems that ruminants are part of. This can for instance be conventional and organic dairy farms, or rosé veal (dairy-beef) calf systems, pasture-based or mixed food production systems, or systems where ruminants are kept for grazing and nature conservation purposes.

We share a concern for the current state of our planet’s health and the relations to the sustainability of systems with livestock. Therefore, we try to understand how the use, care and management of animals affect and interplay with health and wellbeing, spread of zoonoses, antimicrobial use and resistance, climate, biodiversity, soil quality, and food systems, and how to rethink the use of ruminants in the future. We aim to do so through an integrated approach to health and ecosystems, the One Health approach. Read more about how we understand the One Health approach here below.

 

We aim to ensure that the research, education and outreach work carried out by the OH-Sustain researchers have an impact on the full spectrum of the One Health domains, and we therefore keep in mind the definition and strive to support the key underlying principles of One Health published by the One Health High Level Expert Panel and supported by FAO, WOAH, WHO and UNEP, in PLoS Pathogens, 2022, One Health: A new definition for a sustainable and healthy future:

“One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals, and ecosystems. It recognizes the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent.
The approach mobilizes multiple sectors, disciplines, and communities at varying levels of society to work together to foster well-being and tackle threats to health and ecosystems, while addressing the collective need for healthy food, water, energy, and air, taking action on climate change and contributing to sustainable development.

Key underlying principles including

  • equity between sectors and disciplines;
  • sociopolitical and multicultural parity (the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities) and inclusion and engagement of communities and marginalized voices;
  • socioecological equilibrium that seeks a harmonious balance between human–animal–environment interaction and acknowledging the importance of biodiversity, access to sufficient natural space and resources, and the intrinsic value of all living things within the ecosystem;
  • stewardship and the responsibility of humans to change behavior and adopt sustainable solutions that recognize the importance of animal welfare and the integrity of the whole ecosystem, thus securing the well-being of current and future generations; and
  • transdisciplinarity and multisectoral collaboration, which includes all relevant disciplines, both modern and traditional forms of knowledge and a broad representative array of perspectives.

 

Our group includes veterinarian, animal scientists, anthropologists, and an educational researcher, and we cover a wide fields of expertise including the rumen microbiome and drug discovery related to rumen physiology, animal welfare, antimicrobial use quantification, clinical bovine medicine (e.g. within udder health and calf health) and herd health research and consultancy, infectious disease epidemiology and surveillance), and methodological approaches bridging experimental trials, register data-based and observational epidemiology, and ethnographic field work. We find strength in applying both qualitative and quantitative research approaches.

 

Some of our research and project activities are inspired by frameworks such as the Planetary Boundaries Framework from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the concept of absolute sustainability and new holistic ways of approaching sustainability in our modern societies (e.g. Wellbeing Economics). Rather than focusing only on optimising efficiency or the value of one or a few aspects of food production, the broad spectrum of effects and relations in the food production systems should be understood to obtain a sustainable future in which modern food production systems play a major role. This implies investigations of alternative food production methods, rethinking of future scenarios and integrated research based on mixed disciplines, i.e. veterinary and animal science working in close collaboration and exchanging staff with anthropology and ethnography as done in the Cattle Crossroads project.

Other parts of our research and services focus on epidemiological and data-analytic approaches to understanding antimicrobial use and spread of zoonotic diseases in livestock populations, as well as the legislative and communicative development and challenges related to these. We contribute to improving monitoring systems and assist colleagues in data acquisition (e.g. in the project VetStat-Kvæg) and disease control systems (e.g. the Danish Salmonella Dublin surveillance and control programme).

We also work on understanding how farmers and farming students’ work with biosecurity and disease prevention in dairy cattle farms, and the effect of biosecurity and management decisions on farms (e.g. in the EU-Horizon project BIOSECURE, and for the Salmonella Dublin working group under the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration). We collaborate with researchers, specialists and practitioners at the veterinary authorities, the livestock sector, farmers and with other research groups at University of Copenhagen and other universities.

As part of our commitment to sustainability, Associate Professor André Neves has lead a project funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF) that in collaboration with Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology at UCPH and Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany, explores a novel biochemical strategy to reduce methane emissions from ruminants. This work targets a key metalloenzyme complex in archaeal microbes responsible for methane formation via hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Combining molecular modelling, synthetic chemistry, and biochemistry, the project aims to discover and test compounds that disrupt the flavin-based electron bifurcation mechanism central to methane biosynthesis. The long-term goal is to develop effective, feed-based anti-methanogenic additives, while also generating foundational knowledge on archaeal metabolism with broader implications for anaerobic microbial systems.

 

Seminar:

The group helped organise a seminar about Exploring European-Chinese knowledge transfers in pig production at Frederiksberg Campus.
Click to watch the program and video of the presentations

 

 

 

Nathalia Brichet og Liza Rosenbaum Nielsen modtager Novo Nordisk Fondens tværvidenskabelige undervisningspris

Prisen gives for undervisning på KU, der er inspireret af de to forskeres tværvidenskabelige samarbejder i Green Solutions Centre. Nathalia og Liza modtager prisen for at have ydet "en særlig indsats med at uddanne og kvalificere landets tværvidenskabelige universitetsstuderende, og som kan være til inspiration på internationalt niveau."
Læs mere om prisen her

Celebrating the Successful Completion of the One Health International Summer Course 2024

August 2024: Thrilled to announce the successful conclusion of this year’s One Health International Summer Course, which is offered in collaboration between Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, UCPH and the DTU Fødevareinstituttet.
The course brought together a diverse and talented group of students from all corners of the globe, united by a shared passion for addressing the complex interconnections between human, animal, and environmental health. 
Read more about this and see some photos from the course

Presentation  at the annual Cattle conference in Herning

Ph.d. fellow Jeanette Kristensen will give a presentation to farmers and others interested at the annual Cattle conference in Herning. The presentation will be in Danish and will be about preliminary results from her field study where she has visited veal calf producers in Denmark to interview them and observe and discuss practices around antimicrobial use in their farms.
Ph.d. studerende Jeanette Kristensen giver oplæg om sine foreløbige feltprojektresultater fra besøg i slagtekalvebesætninger på Kvægkongressen i Herning, mandag den 26. februar 2024.

Oplægget hedder ’Kendetegn ved slagtekalveproduktioner med højt og lavt antibiotikaforbrug’

Veterinary School communication prize anno 2023

Associate professor and curator Nathalia Brichet won the Veterinary School communication prize anno 2023. The prize was announced during the New Year’s cure on the 10th of January 2024. The communication prize went to Nathalia for her widely popular dissemination of research from the Veterinary School through the exhibition "Production animals: a gallery for the art of the possible". Congratulations!!

We are happy to know that the exhibition in the room upstairs from our offices are frequently have visitors with very diverse backgrounds who come here to learn about and discuss animal farming in Denmark: https://kunet.ku.dk/nyhedsrum/nyheder/Sider/vetschool-nytaarskur-jan-2024.aspx

Veterinary students’ teaching prize 2023

Assistant professor Camilla Kirketerp Nielsen and Professor Liza Rosenbaum Nielsen won the veterinary students’ teaching prize 2023 for their work on implementing sustainability and green transition in livestock farming into a course for last year veterinary students in the One Health and Herd Health tracks. This is a great achievement that would not have happened without the inspiration and support from the Cattle Crossroads project. The prize is called “Saly’s Horse” and was handed out during the annual student party ‘Smediefesten’ on the 26th of May 2023.

’Focus on One Health’

Liza Rosenbaum Nielsen was speaker at the opening seminar for a new One Health Institute at University of Zurich, Switzerland on the 21st of September 2023. She now serves as member of the advisory board for the new center.

 

 

 

Respiratory health consequences of living close to livestock farms

The Cattle Crossroads project

VetStat-Kvæg

BIOSECURE

NEXTCAP and NETCAP-DIP

NEOH / Ecohealth International

COST Action ‘Biosecurity Enhanced Through Training Evaluation and Raising Awareness’ (BETTER)

Salmonella Dublin DK-Vet project (2022-2025): In this project, we have performed a case-control field study in more than 100 Danish dairy farms and are analysing the data to identify risk factors and biosecurity practices associated with the introduction and establishment of S. Dublin in test-negative dairy herds in areas with a non-negligible exposure risk. We also collaborate with the TIPTON research group on data, and design and interpretation of their models to investigate network properties over time between cattle farms in Denmark and to quantify the infection probability by considering different transmission pathways as well as a Salmonella Dublin spread model for Denmark. We will work on investigating the impact of different mitigation measures to reduce the prevalence of S. Dublin in the cattle population by considering already existing implemented mitigation measures. In this project we work together with SEGES Innovation APS, DTU and the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration.