Europe takes steps to maintain the family farm

Sunday, December 4, 2011

From Serbia to Wales, incentives ranging from support for a new house through to improved genetics for dairy cows are being offered to farmers to stop the drift from the land.

by NORMAN DUNN
 

A phrase you'll come across a lot when reading about European agriculture is "drift from the land."

This is not just a farming problem. Local politicians worry about it, too – as well as the mostly elderly people left in dwindling country communities. There, the services once taken for granted, such as primary schools, grocery stores, clinics, public transport services or that lifeline for almost every countryside driver, the friendly neighbourhood auto workshop, are disappearing fast.

And it's not just about young people leaving the land. What's continually happening is that the former backbone of rural life, the family farm, is disappearing too. Keep such family businesses in the country community and there are usually enough youngsters around to create the demand for other services.

Just now, some interesting innovations are being introduced in Europe with this in mind. Take the ideas of Dragan Markovi-Palma, for instance. He's mayor of Jagodina in Serbia, a lonely township of very small farms and all the European symptoms of rural decrepitude – aging farmers, inefficient farming enterprises with poor profitability, and youngsters heading for the big cities the minute school is out for good.

Markovi-Palma sees dairying as an important lifeline for these smaller farms and maybe an incentive to stay. He reckons there's one simple way of increasing income here: introducing higher-yielding cows.

To get hold of the necessary genetics, this politician has already made the long journey to southern Germany to buy around 200 top-yielding animals. These cows are now being shared amongst the community, helping to ensure the first real rise in local farming income for years.

The scheme is so successful that the mayor plans to spend around one million euros on importing another 400 top-yielding cattle in 2012.

Another example of innovative thinking comes from Serbian Jagodina. There, young couples who opt to stay on in the township after marriage can claim a subsidy of 3,000 euros (C$4,230) to help them set-up their first household.

The current agricultural and rural development commissioner for the European Union (EU), Dacian Ciolos of Romania, plans to swing EU agriculture still further away from production-based support payments in the next round of budget adjustments, starting in 2014. He, too, wants to stop the drift from the land.

While hobby farmers certainly have a role to play in injecting solid cash into local communities, Commissioner Ciolos and his planners aim to offer new EU support to persons depending more on the farm for their existence and thus helping to ensure continuation of a settled farming population.

Even more interesting in this respect is Ciolos' plans to help young farmers. An establishment grant is being considered to help them get started with a first farm. Being talked about now is an annual bonus increasing the EU subsidy to the farm in question by 25 per cent.

In Wales, the regional government is taking another approach towards making farm life more attractive for young people. For years in that part of the United Kingdom, house building on farmland has been strictly linked to the labour required on the farm. This means that a young farmer wanting to take over the family unit from his father could not build a new house there if his father wanted to remain on the farm and it was registered as having full-time work for just one person.

The result: either the father vacated the farmhouse or, more usually, the son or daughter and young family simply moved away to find a living elsewhere.

In Wales, the important decision has been taken that the family connection now counts. Even if most farm work is still, theoretically, carried out by the older generation, a new house can be built and a young family established.

If there was real money to be made in farming all the time, then planners would be fighting to keep people off the land. But being stuck down at the start of the food supply chain means there often isn't much money to be made – at least for youngsters starting off. That's why there'll always be a need for other incentives in Europe, such as Dragan Markovi's free cows. BF

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.