As of: March 26, 2024, 5:14 p.m
By: Jannis Gogolin
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Dairy farmer Ruth-Maria Frech hopes to have more time in the cowshed by reducing bureaucracy.
She welcomed the Green Party member of the Bundestag Karl Bär to her farm in Irschenhausen on the topic.
© Sabine Hermsdorf-Hiss
On his bureaucracy tour, the Green Party member of the Bundestag Karl Bär visited the Ickingen dairy farmer Ruth-Maria Frech on her farm in Irschenhausen.
Icking - The farmers' protests are over, but the farmers' demands still resonate.
One of them: a detoxification of the bureaucracy.
On this occasion, the member of the Bundestag for the Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen/Miesbach constituency, Karl Bär (Alliance 90/The Greens), is taking a tour of the Oberland and visiting practitioners from the agricultural sector.
On Monday he made his first stop on the farm of Ruth-Maria Frech, a dairy farmer from Irschenhausen.
About bureaucracy and legislation as a “craft”: Green Party politician visits Ickinger dairy farmer
“In Berlin we issue laws and regulations.
But there is a long way to go before this is implemented by the authorities and by people like Ms. Frech,” said the politician from Holzkirchen, explaining the motivation for his bureaucratic tour.
“I want to see what the farmers ultimately get from our work as legislators.”
A lot of office work if you follow host Frech's comments.
The 33-year-old didn't have to think twice about naming examples of excessive bureaucracy.
She made an example of the animal drug database.
“Every one of my 50 cows is registered there, I enter everything there.” And yet, every six months, Frech is asked to individually check and confirm the data that she has entered there herself.
Deadline: two weeks.
“Again something that you have to think about and the meaning of which I don’t understand.” Apart from digitalization: “I have to print out every process on paper at the latest when there is an audit,” noted the Irschenhauser, who has been running the farm since 2017.
You can read the latest news from Icking here.
Even if the problem with the bureaucracy is known: The farmer fears that the parliamentarians in Berlin are breeding more and more “paper tigers”.
Because, as the Green MP and chairman of the Committee for Food and Agriculture explained: “We are currently working on a reform of the fertilizer regulation.” Germany has continuously exceeded the nitrate limit values in the soil set by the European Union since 1990.
In 2014, the Federal Republic was even sued before the European Court of Justice.
Reforms to the fertilizer regulation followed in 2017 and 2019.
According to Bär, the current rules are “unambitious, not to say pointless.
It's like setting a speed limit of 350 km/h on the motorway.” It is understandable if the current fertilizer regulations are viewed as annoying and useless bureaucracy.
“That’s why we’re working on it right now,” says Bär.
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“I doubt whether this will achieve the goal,” said Frech.
“Putting more and more regulations on top of existing regulations leads to a flood of bureaucracy.” And constant innovations unsettle the farming community – keyword planning security.
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Another practical example from Frech: Until recently, farmers were required to designate at least four percent of the land used for agriculture as fallow land in order to promote biodiversity.
Otherwise there was a risk of EU funding being lost.
The farmer's wife stuck to it.
Then the EU canceled the regulation retroactively to January 1, 2024.
"Others ignored it. And I wish I had done the same."
Ignoring rules and profiting from them is of course not the point of the matter, says Bär and admits: “Making laws is a craft – not an easy one.” Especially when there are 16 different federal states between the legislature and local implementation and their authorities - and the agricultural policy of the European Union hovers above all.
“We have to see how we can get out of the mess,” emphasized the Green politician at the end of the five-hour meeting.
Cheeky: “We’re all together.”
By the way: Everything from the region is also available in our regular Wolfratshausen-Geretsried newsletter.