Kempten - "We don't yet know what's in store for us," says Durach organic farmer Walter Siegel and looks out over the sea of reeds that surrounds the Bachtelweiher on its east bank and largely hides the course of the Bachtelbach.
Although his colleagues Richard and Dominikus Haneberg have regularly mowed part of the natural monoculture for years, a wide inner ring of the reed belt that grows further and further into the pond has remained untouched for four decades. In the meantime, the Bachtelweiher is only 40 centimeters deep in places and threatens to silt up further.
Under the leadership of the Oberallgäu-Kempten Landscape Management Association, Siegel, the Hanebergs, Xaver Lingenheil and the organic farmers Reinhold Lochbihler and Fabian Numberger, whose farms are also in the catchment area of the water, recently started to remove large areas of reeds on 1.6 hectares. The first mowing marks the start of a long-term project and is part of a whole bundle of measures with which the city of Kempten, the Oberallgäu district, the Food, Agriculture and Forests Office (AELF) and the landscape conservation association want to ecologically revive the popular local recreation area.
Once the first reed mowing has been completed, the reeds are to be mowed twice a year from 2022.
Because when the leaves and stems of the reed plants rot in winter, they enrich the pond and stream with phosphate and deprive the water of oxygen.
Other plant species, small organisms and fish are gradually losing their livelihood.
They are disappearing from the biotope, just as the surrounding litter meadows have become smaller and smaller over the years due to the overgrown reed grass.
When mowing, the farmers feel their way cautiously, paying attention to birds, beaver castles and the Bachtelbach, which probably no one knows where exactly it runs over the last few meters to its confluence with the pond.
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Organic farmer Walter Siegel collects the reed grass that his Durach colleague Reinhold Lochbihler (right) has processed with the ribbon rake with his self-built special vehicle.
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Siegel has designed a special vehicle for this special task, explains Kathrin Schratt, geo-ecologist at the Landscape Management Association: He has fitted a small, manoeuvrable tractor with grippers with triple tires so that the machine glides over the muddy ground like a rubber dinghy and hardly sinks into it.
With this device he collects the freshly mown reed and fills it into a dump truck.
The farmer families and their helpers then put the stalks out to dry in elaborate manual labor so that they can be fed back into the nutrient cycle as litter in the cattle shed.
Only heavily contaminated reeds are fermented or composted.
The landscape conservationists have coordinated the late mowing with the Nature Conservation Association and the State Association for Bird Protection. It does not affect the reed breeders, as the breeding season is already behind them and they also prefer the inner reeds that grow out of the water and that are not mowed, explains the manager of the landscape conservation association Leonie Schaefer. If the reed carpet is reduced, about 30 kilograms less phosphate accumulate in the pond every year, explains Rainer Hoffmann, Head of Agriculture at AELF Kempten, the water quality improves and the litter and wet meadows gain 1.6 hectares of land. Butterflies, grasshoppers and plants that prefer nutrient-poor soils can spread again.
The water quality and biodiversity around the brook and pond are to serve further projects in the next few years: For example, the AELF offers advice on topics such as water-friendly fertilization, low-phosphorus feeding or grassland use in the sense of the cultural landscape program (KULAP) for the 41 farms in the catchment area. 80 percent of the farmers in the Bachtel region are already implementing agri-environmental or climate measures; eleven run an organic farm. In cooperation with the Environment Agency, the Kempten Civil Engineering Agency is also examining the construction of a sedimentation basin east of the pond in order to reduce the further deposition of sediments in the water. It is also being investigated whether the Bachtelweiher should be dredged.
The people of Kempten and their guests will have to be patient a little longer before they notice the changes while walking on the circular path, but with the reed mowing these days “a big step” has already been taken for a lively and diverse cultural landscape in the east of Kempten the third mayor Erna-Kathrein Groll.
