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.
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