Europe's farmers given more environmental responsibilities

Sunday, October 5, 2014

As of next year, EU farmers will have to include at least three different crops in their annual rotations. The new rules highlight that over recent decades, the old wide rotations have all but disappeared in many areas

by NORMAN DUNN

The latest European Union (EU) agricultural reform introduces "greening" as the next step in unloading more environmental responsibility onto farming folk. For instance, government concern for wild animal and insect life in the countryside brings legislation for the first time ever, as far as I know, forcing growers to follow crop rotations. From next year, farms of 75 acres and over will need to grow at least three different crops per year. That the new directive had to be introduced at all has come as a bit of a shock to older generation farmers.

Naturally, there have always been areas in Europe where just one or two crops per farm make good financial sense, despite this sort of specialization immediately losing all the many advantages of wider rotations – weed, pest and disease control, reduced fertilizer input, spread of labour peaks, and so on. There are parts of East Anglia in England that, from a financial point of view, can really only grow winter wheat. And the biogas boom in Germany more recently has made very good economic sense for thousands of farmers to monoculture corn for ensiling and fermenting through the year.

But asking growers in other regions of Europe about their reaction to greening suggests that crop businesses have slipped into non-rotational farming over the past 20 years without anyone outside the immediate areas involved really noticing.

The new greening contains much more than just the mandatory rotations. Here's the background: The single-farm subsidies now paid by the EU involved farmers getting around the equivalent of C$175 per acre. This is the average German figure and the support varies a little from country to country.

Nowadays, there's extra cash or penalties for following, or not following, environmental protection concepts such as non-spraying field margins alongside woodlands or streams, hedge planting, or establishing strips of wild plants for bees, to name just a few. From Jan. 1, the single payment is replaced by the "basic payment scheme" with the cash a farmer gets even more dependent on nature conservancy. In fact, one third of the EU support will depend on compliance to rules including the mandatory rotations.

On top of this, five per cent of cropland on each farm from January has to be an "ecological focus area," which can include any, or all, of the following: land left uncultivated for a season, catch crops or green cover between main crops, nitrogen-fixing crops such as peas, beans or clovers. The EU has left national governments to work out their own versions of greening based on the above framework. At time of writing, most countries are still busy evolving some very complicated formulas for their farmers to figure out and try to follow. Just as a quick taste, England suggests that the ecological focus area requirement might be satisfied by 2,000 metres of hedgerow, or 15 acres of catch crops per 100 acres of cropland.

One scenario I've found behind the apparent wholesale abandonment of rotations in many parts of Europe shows that the old lessons about the many advantages of multi-cropping have not, in fact, been forgotten. It's just that individual farm businesses have been expanding steadily over decades. When new farms some distance from the old family farm are taken over, it has proved much simpler to grow one crop per year on the distant holding, but still follow a rotation in the sense of all-wheat being followed by wall-to-wall potatoes and then wheat again followed by barley, for example.

All this will have to stop as of next January, because all decisions so far point at the rotation rule being applied to individual farms and not whole farming businesses.

Certainly in Germany, it has been the "maizing" of the countryside, as the locals describe it – monoculture corn over thousands of acres en bloc that has undoubtedly reduced bird and insect populations and led to extreme pressure on politicians to reintroduce rotations for a more varied countryside vegetation.

The greening is just another sign of how different European farming is from that in North America. The EU's 505 million population in 28 countries with only five per cent living on farms on average (and just half that figure in western Europe) has a tendency, nowadays, to think about the environment first with the needs of farming a very long way down the line.  BF

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.