Brussels concedes to common sense on cropping

Sunday, November 3, 2013

The first idea was to tell growers what to grow – and where – with the aim of stopping monoculture. But free choice has (mostly) prevailed

by NORMAN DUNN

Agriculture policy makers in the European Union (EU) want to pay farmers for returning to reasonable crop rotations. Instead of monoculture, or just a few crops grown every year, the target is to encourage biodiversity and reduce chemical crop protection input.

Growers in the EU receive a fixed farm payment. On most farms, this averages around the equivalent of C$110 to $125 an acre. The latest EU policies aim for 30 per cent of this to be withheld and paid only when respective farms adopt methods that help the environment – including the "old" concept of multi-crop rotations. Surprise, surprise. All hell broke loose when these proposals were first spelled out two years ago.

Let's be realistic here. Just about every conventional crop-growing farmer faces a different situation. Climate, soil, crop disease, weeds and, above all, the markets determine the evolution of rotations or, in large arable areas nowadays, the establishment of monocultures. And this is why I think we'll soon be seeing less pan-European control of farming support legislation and more locally controlled systems, especially when deciding crop permutations for whatever reason.

Even the swiftest trawl through letters pages in the European farming press this year makes it plain that growers everywhere want to decide on their own crops and rotations. And if an outsider has to be involved then, please, let it be someone from back home.

But European farmers should really be heaving sighs of relief. EU cropping control concepts scheduled for 2014 onwards could have been much worse. Original proposals allowed farmers virtually no choice at all. Other than on permanent grassland or for speciality crops such as orchards or vines, they would have had to introduce an approved rotation. Through countless discussions and committees last year, these proposals have been watered down considerably.

To start with, the rules laid down that nitrogen-fixing crops had to be included. There's plenty of agronomic sense here. Potentially, there's money to be saved through lower fertilizer bills and also possibilities for less greenhouse gas production. But many European farmers operate in temperate weather zones. They can forget about a decent yield from soybeans. There are still field beans and protein peas, of course. But often these otherwise useful crops leave the kind of gross margins your bank manager would rather not know about.

Anyhow, mandatory legumes have fallen by the wayside in the EU conception, as has rotational cropping to a greater degree. The idea has now ended up with a minimum of two or three crops having to be grown on every farm. But these could in theory be sown in the same fields year after year. In other words, multi-crop monoculture.

The final outcome at going to press is that the rotations we learned about in farm college have been dropped altogether. Now, farms under 25 acres are ignored. It seems they can pick up their EU payments however they crop. From that size to 75 acres, farmers can get by with two crops, as long as one of them doesn't cover more than 85 per cent of available land. Over the 75-acre mark, at least three crops have to be grown. But one of these can legally cover 75 per cent of the land in any one year. And the two main crops together can take up 95 per cent of the arable area per farm.

Possibly this outcome represents a disappointment for ecologists everywhere. But it does mean a sizeable concession from Brussels towards the concept that cropping in a free market should always be controlled through the market and never by legislation. BF

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.