Wartenberg: skylark window as a regulation for farmers?

Created: 06/25/2022, 19:00

By: Markus Schwarzkugler

Living space in the middle of the field: a lark window.

© LBV

Should skylark windows become mandatory in lease agreements for farmers?

Wartenberg's market council is now discussing this intensively.

Wartenberg – The skylark, 2019 Bird of the Year, is threatened.

That is why the market council had approved the application by Simon Grandinger (CSU) in its previous meeting that farmers be granted a subsidy of ten euros per skylark window (we reported).

Dominik Rutz (Greens) had called for the windows to be stipulated in the leases.

His application was now on the table again in the committee – and was shelved after intensive debate.

A skylark window is a 20 square meter empty space in the field that the bird uses as a landing place, breeding and feeding habitat.

Farmers can set it up by raising the seeder when sowing winter grain, possibly also winter rape.

It's about creating as many windows as possible, Rutz explained at the beginning.

However, Grandinger did not understand the amount he imagined.

According to him, there is not enough space for this.

One is the recently decided funding, said Rutz.

The other, however, is the decision on how the market wants to proceed in its own fields.

Eduard Ertl (Neue Mitte) advised first to check specifically where skylark windows are possible at all and only then to commit the tenants to suitable areas - and also to pay them ten euros.

Mayor Christian Pröbst (CSU) recommended that the termination (and renewal) of current leases should be waited until next year.

You should first consult with an expert in the course of the ecological cadastre – and Rutz's application should be postponed until then.

That's okay, said the Green, even if he doesn't understand it 100 percent now.

Josef Sedlmaier (CSU) demanded "to seek dialogue with the farmers and not to terminate the contracts beforehand".

"I don't know if the larks from last time are different," Michael Paulini (SPD) sided with Rutz.

Pröbst replied that the CSU application was a promotion of voluntariness, while it was now a matter of compulsion.

Rutz didn't want to hear anything about coercion, it's just about "what we do with our fields".

Pröbst said angrily: "If I write something like that in the contract, then it's a compulsion." Like last time, Franz Gerstner demanded that the whole thing be left on a voluntary basis and not "to come with the big club".

Nikolaus Hintermaier (FDP) criticized Rutz's application for the CSU application for fields over three hectares in size, now for meadows.

He was of the opinion that it should still be cleverly worked out for the administration, while Rutz said that the lark "doesn't care how big the field is".

The subject isn't over yet, as the Bavarian so beautifully puts it.