ASSAF - E

Their core work

ASSAF-E is the Spanish national breeders association for the Assaf sheep breed — a high-yielding dairy sheep that dominates Spain's sheep milk sector. Their core work is running and maintaining the national studbook, coordinating genetic improvement programs among member farms, and collecting performance data (milk yields, growth rates, health records) from commercial flocks across Spain. In EU research contexts, they serve as the link between academic research and practicing breeders: they provide real-world breeding data, recruit farmer participants for trials, and translate scientific recommendations back into actionable breeding decisions for their membership.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their first project (iSAGE, 2016–2020), ASSAF-E's involvement centred on the bigger picture of European sheep and goat systems: sustainability assessments, socio-economic pressures, consumer trends, demographics, and adapting livestock systems to climate change. By their second engagement (SMARTER, 2018–2023), the focus had shifted sharply inward to the animal and genome level — feed efficiency, genomic selection, resilience trade-offs, and mathematical predictive models. This shift suggests the consortium research community sees ASSAF-E's value less as a policy/systems voice and more as a provider of breed-level genetic data from real commercial populations.

ASSAF-E is moving from broad system-level sustainability questions toward precision genetics and data-driven breeding tools — a natural progression as genomic selection becomes practical for commercial sheep farms.

How they like to work

ASSAF-E has never led an H2020 project — they join as participant or third party within large, multinational consortia. Their two projects involved 60 unique partners across 17 countries, which reflects the scale of pan-European livestock research networks rather than ASSAF-E building its own network. As a breed society, they are a specialist data and community access node: research teams come to them for breed registry data and farmer recruitment, not for laboratory work or technical leadership.

ASSAF-E has connected with 60 research and industry partners across 17 countries through two large European research consortia. Their network is built through these consortia rather than independently, placing them within the core European small ruminant research community that includes major agricultural universities and livestock institutes.

What sets them apart

ASSAF-E brings something no university or research institute can replicate: direct access to Spain's commercial Assaf sheep sector, including the national studbook, multi-year performance records from active farms, and a membership of practicing breeders willing to participate in trials. For consortia working on genomic selection or breeding program design, this means access to real-population data rather than experimental flocks. Any research project that needs to validate results against commercial breeding reality in Southern Europe should consider them.

Highlights from their portfolio

• iSAGE
  ASSAF-E's primary funded engagement (EUR 73,750), placing them inside a major 4-year pan-European consortium that examined sheep and goat production across multiple dimensions from climate adaptation to consumer trends.
• SMARTER
  A larger follow-on project (running to 2023) where ASSAF-E contributed as a third party to genomic selection and resilience modelling research — indicating the research community saw continued value in their breed data access after iSAGE.