Objectives of the Engeneering Office

 
 
  Hay-harvest in July 2011, near the lake Vänern, Sweden, (© Sebastian Lakner)

Hay-harvest in July 2011, near the lake Vänern, Sweden, (© Sebastian Lakner)

 
 

rechts Customer of the Office

The "Engeneering Office for Nature-Conservation and Agricultural Economics" was founded in June 2004 by Sebastian Lakner. The office offers different services in the area of agricultural economics and policy and nature-conservation. Important customer are different planning offices in Saxony, Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt and with the University of Kassel, Witzenhausen. It also provides agricultural studies for Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND e.V.) and other political actors.

rechts Objectives and Tasks

The office adresses questions on the conflicts between sustainable and economically attratctive agricultural production and a ecologically sound and landscape forming agriculture.

The "classical" conflict between an intesive and economically attractive and an extensive and sound agriculture was to some extent solved due to the so called Fischler-Reform in the course of the Mid-Term-Review after 2005, since farmers have to orient not only at the markets but also at the social requirements. The old way of subsidising land or even tons of wheat was (more or less) abolished with that last reform-step, were premia were decoupled from the production process.

For farms on marginal locations and in regions with less productive area giving up the production on certain area is an option. Giving up production is not of advantage for environment and nature-conservation. Farms on marginal location can potentially can adress the preferences of society and profit from agri-environmental schemes by producing biodiversity and avoiding damage due to e.g. ground-water pollution. The office tries to support and motivate these farms to use options to continue production on less productive locations.

The perspective of naturprotection also depends from the type of farmer. Many plots which are very interesting from the biodiversities point of view are used by old farmer or part-time farmer. For sustaining the environmental friendly production on these plots it is necessary to motivate these farmers and to promote the production by agri-environmental programmes. This also menas to provide information and support in the application process, which is sometimes complicated.

For Farms in highly productive area we can observe a tendency towards an intensification of production - driven by high world-market prices in 2007 and 2010. Farms extend their production and use more intensive technologies, which contradicts natureprotection. For a reduced intensity and for production schemens that sustain biodiversity, it is necessary to provde information for farm-managers. We want to motivate farmers to even keep the environmental friendly production in some areas. The identification of these areas is part of the managementplanning. Nevertheless, this is dependent from the decision of the farm-managers to produce environmental friendly in some parts of a farm.

Unfortunately the financial volume of the agri-environmental schemes has not grown substantially since 2005. There are still a lot of deficites in the programmes. So farmers sometimes need extension in order to optimally use the offered programs.

The office is looking for consultation with farmers, local and regional authorities, agricultural extension services, planning offices, environmental NGOs in order to find compromises for nature-protection.