Farmers are sounding the alarm: more and more arable land is being lost
Created: 05/04/2022, 05:20
By: Charlotte Borst
At work on a field in Ottobrunn: The PIK program enables more flexible solutions and more protection of species on farms © Marc Oliver Schreib
Farmers in the Munich district are sounding the alarm.
They warn that more and more fields are being lost for compensation areas.
Farmers' association and the district CSU are calling for a rethink.
District
– Experts fear that the war in Ukraine and the lack of grain exports could trigger famines in numerous countries around the world.
But Bavaria is well positioned and can cover its own needs through domestic production.
"With a degree of self-sufficiency of over 100 percent, our grain supply is solid," says Nicole Fischer, Managing Director of the Bavarian Farmers' Association.
District farmer Sonja Dirl confirms this assessment: "We can cover our needs." Self-sufficiency is guaranteed for grain, potatoes, sugar, milk and beef.
Agricultural land in the district has shrunk by 13 percent
However, farmers warn that more and more land has been lost to agriculture in recent years.
In Upper Bavaria, the area used for agriculture shrank by eight percent between 1988 and 2020, and by as much as 13 percent in the district of Munich.
In 1988 there were still 24,877 hectares, by 2020 3,342 hectares had been withdrawn.
In the city of Munich, there was a 31 percent loss of land: the 7,065 hectares in 1988 were reduced by 2,178 hectares by 2020.
If this continues, farmers will face massive problems.
"The floor is finite," says Sonja Dirl.
Areas are sealed not only for commercial areas, solar parks, roads and construction projects.
About a third of the lost agricultural land is needed for compensation areas to compensate for interventions through construction projects, as stipulated by the Federal Nature Conservation Act.
"It's a pity and avoidable"
Take Garching as an example: the realization of the "Schleißheimer Kanal" construction area is in danger of failing because the city and the investor can no longer find any compensation area for the skylark.
The city leases the last possible field to a farmer, whose livelihood it does not want to deprive.
"It is a pity and avoidable if, in addition to construction measures that consume space, too much space is lost for the necessary compensation," says farmer and CSU district councilor Anton Stürzer: "This indirect use of land drives the scarcity all the faster." The Bavarian Farmers' Association demands that areas be preserved for regional agriculture and that new paths be taken in the compensation measures: With "production-integrated compensation measures" (PIK), fields are continuously ecologically upgraded.
PIK is already being implemented in other districts
The CSU now also supports this approach.
"The pressure from the different uses on the areas in the district of Munich is enormous," says Stefan Schelle, CSU parliamentary group leader in the district council.
He asks District Administrator Christoph Göbel (CSU) in a letter to inform the district committees about the PIK.
Measures can be extensive grain cultivation with larger distances between the seed rows or flowering strips along the fields.
Lapwing islands or skylark windows would also be possible.
The sowing machine is raised to 20 to 40 square meters within the grain field so that the ground breeder can find fallow land.
The measures can be carried out permanently in one area and entered in the land register as an easement, or they can be implemented on a rotating basis in a specified cycle on different areas.
PIK is already being implemented in other districts, district farmer Sonja Dirl appeals to municipalities and planners to establish it together with the farmers in the district of Munich.
In this way, you can create particularly valuable building blocks in the open landscape, both ecologically and in terms of biodiversity, says Stefan Schelle: "There is a higher level of acceptance in agriculture and it also enables flexible change of course in crisis situations."
More news from the district of Munich can be found here.
