The 2020 Innovation Awards Roullier – Summary

The pandemic has thrown the importance of scientific research into stark relief. Against this exceptional backdrop, the Groupe Roullier held its 2020 ceremony on January 11, in unprecedented virtual format, announcing the two research teams that are the recipients of this year’s Innovation Awards Roullier. Their prize? A grant of €75,000 and a one-year research contract with the Centre Mondial de l’Innovation Roullier (CMI Roullier - Saint-Malo, France) for each team.

A look back over the 2020 Innovation Awards which garnered a wealth of innovative projects for the future of agriculture and industry.

The Groupe Roullier created the innovation Awards in 2018 to promote scientific collaboration with renowned universities and institutes and strengthen the strategy of innovation that has been one of the Group’s central tenets since its foundation. The aim was to create bridges between fundamental university-based research and applied research at the CMI Roullier, in order to develop and propose agronomic solutions with high added value to our subsidiaries in Plant Nutrition and Animal Nutrition. The Innovation Awards Roullier are a competition open to all research and university laboratories which reward the two best research projects related to the Groupe Roullier’s areas of expertise: Plant Nutrition and Animal Nutrition.

In this second time of the competition, the targeted future-looking themes were:

For Plant Nutrition:

• Soil fertility, nutrition and plant health
• Innovative cultural practices and agroecology
• Soil structure, water management and climate change
• Biodiversity and soil functions

For Animal Nutrition:

• Mineral nutrition and availability of elements (calcium, phosphorus and magnesium)
• Intestinal health and immunity
• Animal welfare

The competition received more than 100 entries from researchers in 32 different countries. The two internationally renowned panels of judges were made up of six members, each an expert in their field:

For Plant Nutrition:

• Prof. Sharon R. Long of Stanford University (USA)
• Dr. Günter Brader of the Austrian Institute of Technology (Austria)
• Prof. Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University (USA)

For Animal Nutrition:

• Prof. Paul Bikker of Wageningen University (Netherlands)
• Prof. Paulo César de Faccio Carvalho of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
• Prof. Mario Estévez of the University of Extremadura (Spain)

They were impressed by the high quality of the entries, and their ambitious, innovative ideas. Their final selection was based on projects demonstrating the best balance of scientific excellence and industrial development potential.

On this basis, the project submitted by Dr. Cécile Monard (Head of Research at CNRS, France) and Dr. Abdelhak El Amrani (lecturer at the University of Rennes 1, France) was awarded the prize in Plant Nutrition. The original nature of their project is based on a new approach to modulating natural interactions between plant roots and micro-organisms in the soil taking place within the rhizosphere*, in order to promote microbial populations beneficial to plant health and nutrition.

The prize for Animal Nutrition went to Prof. Mateus P. Gionbelli (Assistant Professor at the Federal University of Lavras, Brazil) and Prof. Marcio Duarte (Assistant Professor at the Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil). This project seeks to optimise nutritional efficiency during the first phases of bovine development, through a better overall understanding of the physiological and biochemical mechanisms involved, and by correlating the zootechnical information and “omics”** data gathered by the latest biological technology.

The winning teams were each awarded a grant of €75,000 and the opportunity to develop their agronomic research project for one year in partnership with the Groupe Roullier. The promising results of these projects will be made available to our subsidiaries, TIMAC AGRO and Phosphea, with the aim of finding new, innovative solutions to meet the needs of the farmers and breeders who form our customer base.

We look forward to following the progress of these projects with our subsidiaries throughout 2021.

In the meantime, meet the winners in the video of the award ceremony:

*Rhizosphere: The layer of the soil penetrated by plant roots and associated micro-organisms. Nutritional elements undergo transformation in the rhizosphere so they can be absorbed by the plant.

**Omics: all the branches of science that enable a global understanding of complex and dynamic biological systems. “Omics" data is analysed according to its specialist domain: genes (genomics), RNA (transcriptomics), proteins (proteomics), metabolites (metabolomics).