Letter from Europe: Reclaiming wetlands - Europe's about-turn in countryside policy

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Schemes in several European countries are paying farmers to return cropland to marsh, permitting vanished or endangered species to come home

by NORMAN DUNN

In Europe's coastal areas, some farmers are being encouraged to break drains and block ditches, letting their fields fall back into natural wetlands. The rewards include a richer wildlife – and payments of up to $500 dollars per acre!

For 45 years, the Rowson family were busy putting in drains to reclaim wetland on their Lincolnshire farm in East England. At that time, the British government wanted morecrop output and were happy to pay for the new ditches and pipes.

Now, the family, along with dozens of other farmers along the English east coast, is receiving financial help from the European Union to break up the drainage system and re-introduce wetlands on part of the farm.

This about-turn in countryside policy is taking place in other parts of Europe, too. In the Netherlands, one target is to "reclaim" 125,000 acres for wetland nature before 2015. Some of this is extremely fertile farmland, won from the marshes at huge expense over the past 400 years.

Back in England, thousands of acres are also being diverted back into waterlogged areas, the way they were before the agricultural revolution and later schemes such as large-scale drainage and ditching in the 1950s and '60s.

Regaining an environment capable of supporting rare plant and bird life is the main reason for this. And there's no doubt that the schemes have mainly been very successful in this respect, with once-common but now increasingly scarce wetland birds, such as golden plover, lapwing, redshank, teal and widgeon, streaming back onto the re-flooded areas. Many of these had survived fairly well on drained farmland under more extensive cropping 50 years ago, but soon cleared out when autumn-sown cereals and oilseed took over, with their associated intensive crop protection and nutrition programs.

Now, there's hardly a farmer anywhere who will flood productive cropland just for the hell of it. So the payments being offered can be quite generous. For instance, under the English Environmental Stewardship Scheme, labour costs for tree planting, fencing, preliminary earth-moving and other preparation work can be grant-aided. On top of this, the scheme pays the equivalent of around $250/acre per year to landowners. The farms involved may also be eligible for the EU single farm payment subsidy that can add another $250 for each acre.

Although wheat prices and the returns for other cereals are looking up nowadays, the relatively low income for cereal farmers in previous years was a deciding factor in pushing coastal farmers into re-flooding some of their fields.

Up to just four years ago, wheat and canola had been growing well on the 115 acres of the Rowson family farm now put back into wetlands. Brothers Fred and John Rowson told the specialist arable magazine CROPS that even though they were achieving consistently good yields with their winter wheat, prices below $105 per tonne meant a loss averaging $19 per tonne at that time. This was when they applied to form a nature reserve under the Environment Stewardship Scheme.

After the project was approved, the first task was to fence off the area which is part of their 186-hectare arable farming business. Field surfaces were bulldozed to form shallow lakes and native grasses were sown. Arable grasses, such as hybrid ryegrass, were not allowed.

In the first year, only 12 pairs of endangered species lapwings nested in the wetland area. Three years later, the nesting population has risen to 74 pairs.
A review of this wetland scheme will take place after five years and then the farmers might be accepted for a 10-year contract with further annual payments. 

While the English approach still tends to leave the farmers affected with just a proportion of the fields under water and most of their former unit still growing crops, the Dutch are sometimes taking a much more radical approach and simply shipping the farmers out before breaking the dykes and letting the rivers and sea take over. This has already happened on the island of Tiengemeten near Rotterdam. There, the few tenants cropping the fertile land were found new fields and homes on the mainland.

This grant-aided turnaround from arable land to nature reserve seems like a drastic solution at first. But, in reality, the schemes are reclaiming for wild plants, animals and birds only a very small proportion of what has been taken away in the past. In England, for example, less than one per cent of the east coast marshlands – the so-called Fens – that existed 400 years ago are still there. And no doubt many a farmer is secretly glad that some of the most difficult and wet fields on the farm are being sent back to nature! BF

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.