First mapping of living laboratory completed

09 October 2017 - Published by Hein Braaksma

The Danish partnership in REFRAME is named “Islands of Denmark”. It takes advantage of the fact that islands are natural geographical entities and it furthermore implies that the Danish strategy in the project is to let the REFRAME approach develop from the smaller entities to larger regions.

The island of Læsø has less than 2000 inhabitants. Yet, it is a municipality and it has a very strong identity based on the production of salt from hypersaline ground water as it was done in the middle ages. The island is visited by 150.000 tourists every year. Among other, yet unexploited potentials in signature food production is beef from cattle on 4.500 hektars of Nature 2000 pasture. The bottle neck is the ability to slaughter potentially 700 pieces of cattle – plus sheep and free-range pigs - every year on the island. A business case of establishment of a low-cost slaughter house on the island has been made, a food network of producers and customers on the island has been established, and a commitment of the municipality has been defined to facilitate the development of a business case where island identity is strengthened and value is added on the island in every step from farm to fork in production of meat.