Full-time farming on the decline in Europe

by NORMAN DUNN

Paradoxically, this situation is spinning the agricultural sector in the opposite direction to that planned by the politicians. For years, the call here has been for professionalism in farming: fewer farmers, full-time farmers, bigger units, better efficiency. That was the theory. But if income is going to stay, low then there's no way of expanding, no matter how good you are at farming.

This trend has been clear for many years in poorer European countries like Italy, Greece and Spain where, now, over two-thirds of all registered farmers spend less than half their time working on the land. But part-time farmers are growing in number in the more affluent countries too.

In Britain, for instance, only 50 per cent of the 233,000 registered farmers now work full time on their land. This is a big change from 30 years ago when only about 20 per cent of farmers earned income unconnected with agriculture, and most of these were the better-off ones with external income from army pensions and investments. Funnily enough, investments and pensions are still the biggest source of external incomes for farmers in Britain -- not surprising when you consider that the average age in this sector is now around 55. What are these other income sources, though? Well, a survey by the English National Farmers Union (NFU), based on family income, puts salaries of farmers' wives -- traditionally working as teachers -- as the second largest income source. Third largest is farmers' earnings from agriculture-related work off the farm, usually contracting or extension services. Fourth place in the NFU list maybe hints at the depths to which farm incomes (or losses) have sunk in recent years -- income from state-run social support schemes.

In Germany, where there are just over 530,000 farmers with 40 per cent of those earning all their cash on the farm, the largest chunk of external earnings (after pensions and investment income) is claimed to come from tourism. Anyone travelling through Bavaria can see that a sizeable proportion of farms round the holiday centres have changed their farmhouses from simple Bed & Breakfasts into regular hotels, even although the cows are still there to be milked before work starts on guest breakfasts.

That leads me to one of the best examples I've heard lately of farmer enterprise in securing additional income. Just outside of Hanover, where the EXPO 2000 World Exhibition is currently being held, hog feeder Hans Huster-Klatte noticed the tremendous shortage of overnight accommodation for the guests expected for this event. At the same time came the news that the United States was pulling out of EXPO 2000, leaving behind hundreds of tonnes of processed timber which was to be used in the building of the U.S. pavilion. Hans snapped-up the timber and used it to build 100 log cabins on land just seven or eight miles from the exhibition ground. Each cabin now has a shower, toilet and television, and he's renting them at the equivalent of $180 per night. Thus another German farmer joins the ranks of the part-timers!

The lands with the most full-time farmers have remained the same for years now. Most of these are where farmers are still regarded as important export earners: the Netherlands with over 67 per cent of farmers full-time, and Ireland with exactly two-thirds of the island's 148,000 farmers getting by without employment outside the farm.

Of course, there are always two sides to every story like this. I once had a lot to do with farm machinery dealers in the United Kingdom. Now, the favourite customers of this sector weren't usually the "professional" full-time farmers, but their more "amateur" neighbours who earned most of their money from the neighbouring automobile factory and looked on farming as a pleasant way of passing their spare time. They were usually the only ones with enough liquid capital to buy decent new machinery! BF
Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.

The state pushes its nose ever deeper into private farming

by NORMAN DUNN

There are now mandatory schemes in Sweden, Denmark and Holland. In most German states, nutrient bookkeeping is still voluntary, but if you're thinking of applying for planning permission for a new livestock building, then full nutrient accounting certainly helps!

Here's how the Dutch system of accounting works. Full details of soil type and crop are entered for each field, then the amount of fertiliser and manure added in terms of N, P and K is calculated. The yield from the field is also calculated in the same way -- the amounts of N, P and K sold off the farm. Farmers are then allowed a certain amount of nutrient ''loss'' through drainage, etc. An average permitted annual loss of phosphate for pasture, for instance, is 36 lb per acre. Here's where the payments start, with the first excess 22 lb of P over this loss figure costing the farmer a fine of about 70 cents/lb. Above the 22 lb mark, the penalty rises to the equivalent of $3/lb.

Then there's the paperwork. The Dutch system not only demands faultless accounting with fines also applied here if the annual official bookkeeping check throws up any funny figures. It also needs complete details if any livestock manure is taken off the farm to be spread elsewhere. The red tape here starts with every single tanker load having to be checked on a public weighbridge and the contents sampled and laboratory-tested -- and guess who has to pay all these bills!

Up until now, though, as long as European farmers stay within the various national limits for excess N and P, nutrient accounting only costs time and the sort of frustration that always seems to be linked to all official form filling.

But a new approach to state intervention in farming comes from Ireland where some farmers now have to be licensed in order to rear animals. What's more, the licenses have to be bought from the government. The initial cost is the equivalent of $4,460 per farm. Unless, the average number of animals on the farm changes, that's a once-and-for-all payment. But all licence holders also have an annual fee to cover inspections, sampling and administration. This costs another $1,400 upwards, depending on the size of the farm.

The Irish farm-licensing programme, for pig or poultry units to begin with, is also linked to nutrient accounting. The licences are issued by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency and now apply to over 60 per cent of the country's pig production farms (from the equivalent of 60 sows upwards). They represent the backbone of a very flexible, but expensive, legal infrastructure which applies pollution controls according to the individual farm size and location. .

In order to be applicable for a licence, a complete farm nutrient management system with, once again, field-by-field accounts on fertiliser/manure application and disposal has to be kept. These nutrient accounts have to be submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency annually and must show a balanced use of nutrients backed by yearly on-farm soil and ground water tests. Current rules also include a minimum six months' manure storage facility and strict adherence to spreading limits for manure. Manure application limits are based entirely on the type of soil, its nutrient status and the crop being grown. Air quality around pig and poultry housing and manure storage areas is also liable to on-farm checks.

Other rules: no new livestock buildings are allowed within 400 metres of dwelling houses; all farms must have sufficient land available for manure spreading according to per acre application limits given in individual licenses. In addition, there has to be a "buffer spreading area'' to allow for emergency spreading when, for example, some fields are flooded.

On most soil types, licensed farmers can keep up to 300 sows in a rearing unit, 3000 feeding pigs or 180 to 200 breeding sows in a farrow-to-finish unit. For poultry units, a licence is required for any farms with over 10,000 broiler places or units with more than 5,000 layers or turkeys.

Where the number of breeding sows on a single farm tops 300, the business is then termed "big'' under the Environmental Protection Agency rules and the cost of obtaining a licence rises to the equivalent of $12,500 with an additional annual charge which can reach $5,300.

What's coming next? Will French farmers have to buy licenses for growing corn? Watch this space! BF
Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.

Corn silage now Europe's forage crop of choice

by NORMAN DUNN

Now, the boot's on the other foot over almost all of Europe. Corn silage is (rightly) regarded as the target for the farmer who wants to give his cows the best. I've seen it growing successfully all over arable Scotland. I've even visited farms in Sweden and Finland harvesting 13 to 15 tonnes of corn silage per acre - and there the crop can't even be sown until June because of frosts. As for grass silage, no one wants to know about it anymore.

And yet one of the interesting aspects of European farming is the variety of its crops and farming customs. Most regions of the world have accepted corn as top forage and left it at that. But in different parts of Europe farmers can still be found cutting and ensiling the crops their grandfathers grew, or else doing exactly the opposite and trying to improve on even the latest forage. Field beans, whole-plant cereals, lupins and kale are still chopped on some farms and rolled in the bunker for winter feed. Don't laugh, but I've even visited a farm feeding fish silage. Strong stuff, that was - and with a protein content topping the 50 per cent mark! But more about that later.

In the European north, Denmark is certainly the top forage corn growing country. But even here there remain quite large-scale dairy farmers (100 cows and over) who can be found feeding some pretty exotic silage recipes to their beasts: green-cut peas mixed with whole-plant barley, for instance. Or how about grass, chopped fodder beet and field beans? Denmark's national forage research institute reckons that these mixes are still good for yielding feed energy in dry matter per acre equivalent to a harvest of 2.6 tonnes/acre of barley.

Also to be found in Denmark is a really ancient forage crop that has come across the eastern European borders from Estonia and White Russia - the leguminous galega. This is a sort of far-north alfalfa, 25 per cent protein in dry matter and yields of up to 8 t/ac, with the added advantages of lasting in the fields for up to 20 years and surviving winters where the mercury sinks to minus 50 degrees C.

Lupin silage? It's still being fed to dairy cattle in Britain and Germany and sweet white varieties are giving a winter forage feed with protein content of 11.5 per cent and 10 to 11 megajouls of energy per kilogram. Kale silage is below grass for energy production but can also pep up the ration with 11 per cent protein. Kale's an exotic choice that really is under pressure now. The few who grow it say cows love the taste. It used to be bunkered, with enormous losses due to its high water content. Now, the juicy stems are mown, wilted, baled, and wrapped in airtight plastic. With that sort of effort (and expense), little wonder that only 1,000 acres of kale were kept for silage in Britain last year!

Even corn has been experimented with as an ingredient of a silage blend. In France back in the early 1980s, there was a fad for maya silage. Maya was produced by planting corn and soybeans in alternate rows right across the field. The positioning of the rows allowed the forage harvester to lift a row of corn and beans together with each cutterhead intake. I've lost touch with the crop now, but at that time growers were claiming a field-fresh weight of over 20 t/ac (80 per cent being corn), and dry matter and energy yields up to 10 per cent greater than forage corn on its own. The biggest boost was, of course, the digestible protein from the green-cut soya plant. This raised the blend protein production by 70 per cent compared with straight corn, according to the French growers.

I can't sign off without mentioning the fish silage again. This idea was a hit on the islands of Orkney for a short spell in the 1970s. It never succeeded with dairy cows for obvious reasons. After all, even a mite too much fishmeal in the milker ration can give milk an interesting flavour. But on these islands, where fishing and farming went hand-in-hand, fish heads and other offal stored in barrels with organic acid dissolved into a sort of soup - a bouillabaisse for bovines - and was, I'm told, greatly enjoyed as a high-protein supplement by beef cattle.

Looking at all this, it's not really surprising that straightforward forage corn, with simple harvesting possible at a high dry matter and easy feeding, is now the crop that most European farm kids associate with silage. In comparison, most of the older ideas were fairly messy to harvest, handle and feed, which is why their enthusiasts are scattered pretty thinly across Europe -- or have disappeared from the farming scene altogether.
Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.

Surprise, surprise - pesticide taxes for European farmers

by Norman Dunn

Or look what happened when the European Union finally decided to stop the use of corn herbicide atrazine. The French Ministry of Agriculture wisely pointed out that its farmers had nothing else to control certain weeds. Years later, atrazine is still allowing French farmers cheaper weed control in their corn, while crop advisers in neighbouring countries have forgotten how it's even spelled.

It's much the same in all walks of French farming. Where the grass roots have a good argument, the paternal government has always, up until now, been prepared to listen and lend a helping hand -- even when sometimes a small riot is required to attract attention.

All the more amazing, then, when we farming observers awoke on January 1, 2000, to see the dawn of a completely new French farming policy. "This is really an about-turn -- completely new policies and politics as far as our government is concerned," was how one leading state agronomist in Paris reacted. He was speaking about January 1's new tax on pesticide sprays. From now on, French farmers have to pay if they want to spray. And, in 2002, they will face a tax on fertilisers as well.

The biggest surprise of all is that the income from the new pesticide tax -- an estimated $66 million for 2000 -- isn't going to be spent on agriculture, or even on the countryside. Instead, the money is being reserved to help pay for the country's social security program.

Not that this tax is very high. Under the new tax, active spray ingredients are split into seven categories according to their toxicity and perceived impact on the environment. The categories range from class 1 substances such as copper- or sulphur-based fungicides, which are regarded as more or less environmentally harmless and zero-rated, up to class 7 heavyweight herbicides such as diquat, which earn a levy of around $1.12 per pound of active ingredient. But less potent, although very effective, products such as the fungicide Opus with class 3 ingredient epoxyconazole will cost the farmer only an extra 10 cents for every acre of cereals treated.

France isn't completely alone in taxing crop sprays in Europe. Denmark and Sweden have both run this sort of fiscal program for several years now. In Denmark, for instance, a 36 percent tax was put on the retail price of insecticides and then doubled in 1998. Interestingly, Danish insecticide use didn't decrease as expected after this last increase. Farmers have been quick to point out that insecticide applications in Denmark have been whittled down so much that to use less in susceptible crops like oilseed rape would result in no harvest at all.

An important point about both the new French and the old Danish pesticide taxation is that in neither case are the farmers expected to pay 100 percent of the tax. In Denmark, the government collects the levy from the farm store that sells the products and it's up to the operator how much to pass on to his customer. In France, the Ministry of Agriculture has said that it expects the manufacturers or importers of the pesticides to pay a certain amount of the levy. Just how much has not yet been decided.

Denmark was also first in Europe with a farmer tax on fertiliser nitrogen use. Currently this stands at the equivalent of 45 cents per lb. Once again, though, the levy is made at the farm store with the operator deciding how much to pass on to the farmer. Even more important for the farm business are government limits on how much N can be spread on individual farms --for instance 112 lb. N per acre on a sandy soil west-coast farm. Spreading more than this (and each farm has to keep an "account book" of fertiliser and pesticide applications) attracts a sliding scale of fines starting at the equivalent of 90 cents per lb.

Is the rest of rural Europe nervous about such pioneering farming taxes? You bet! First, countries that have them in place now have set a precedent for new fiscal income with tremendous scope for increase in the coming years. Second, there's nothing like new taxation programs for making exchequers all round Europe sit up and take notice. The year 2000 is only a few weeks old and already Britain has signified deep interest in a system like France's, and Germany has started the year with a similar idea: an "ecological tax increase" on farm diesel fuel.

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.