Our Story   ARCHIVE   Letter From Europe   Issues May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 August/September 2002 June/July 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002 November 2001 October 2001 August/September 2001 June/July 2001 May 2001 April 2001 March 2001 February 2001 January 2001 October 2000 August/September 2000 June/July 2000 May 2000 February 2000 January 2000 December 1999 November 1999   Coming Events Contact Us   back to Current Issue

Letter From Europe By Norman Dunn, who writes about European agriculture from Germany. January 1, 2000 Manure buried in paperwork by Norman Dunn What do European farmers see ahead as they put the euphoria of a new millennium behind them and pull on their work boots for the first time in 2000? "Still more paperwork," was the short answer of a Dutch friend. "Being a member of the European Union in the past brought farmers guaranteed prices for produce and a relatively secure market. In return we got more and more environmental protection laws plus days of form filling. Now, there's less market support." Yet the paperwork's still growing, and most of it seems to centre on environmental laws controlling livestock manure disposal. Admittedly, there have been big problems in Europe due to overstocking of livestock -- mainly pigs and poultry - which has caused ground water pollution. For the past 20 years there's been a mounting campaign in high-risk areas -- east Netherlands, north-west Germany, Brittany in France, for example -- to reduce the risks by matching manure application to the actual needs of the crops on the surrounding farms. Here's where the paperwork really starts because right from the start the authorities have demanded copper-bottomed proof of the amount of manure applied and where it was being spread. In most cases, European farmers have seen the sense of the many changes. It's a new lack of flexibility lawmakers are showing that is souring the beginning of the millennium for the farming community. Let's look at some of the basic regulations. In Denmark and the Netherlands, new liquid manure slurry storage silos have to be airtight to stop ammonia emissions. For the same reason, in-house systems for below-slat flushing are favoured. Manure spreading on the fields is only allowed in the crop-growing season. To stop nitrate run-off, at least 65 percent of cropland on Danish farms must be kept green over winter with autumn-sown cereals or a green manure crop. In Germany, some regions actually pay farmers to grow this ground cover of mustard, buckwheat, lupins or phacilia, usually through a grant equivalent to $45 an acre. Manure spreading limits there depend on the soil, the local climate and the "amount of nutrients required by the growing crop under acceptable farming practice." Here's where the real complications start, because most regions are insisting on annual soil tests to back-up the system and these currently cost from $40 a probe. Also, many farmers just don't have land enough for the amount of manure produced, so they make agreements with crop-growing neighbours to spread on their fields. A simple contract is all that is required if spreading is on a farm within a radius of a few miles. But the minute the tractor and manure wagon cross the county line, the paperwork increases dramatically. The different local authorities affected have to be notified about every single manure wagonload. What's more, they require the addresses of the farms involved, the exact amount of manure being transported, the exact times of transporting and spreading and even the name and address of the tractor driver. The Dutch have gone further by introducing a series of "levies" which their farmers have to pay if the amount of manure spread on each farm exceeds a pre-set limit -- once again assessed according to crop needs and soil nutrient status. Here, a manure accounting system is applied. This means fertiliser input and output in terms of crops and products sold off the farm are compared at the end of each season. The difference is regarded as "lost" nutrients and measured in terms of nitrogen and phosphate. Losses -- that is N and P not recovered in crops going off the farm -- are allowed up to a current limit of 267 pounds per acre of N and 35 pounds per acre of P on grassland, 140 pounds and 35 pounds respectively on cropland. Anything over this, and the farmer starts having to pay. Up to December 31, the first 22 pounds of phosphate (P) losses cost 80 cents a pound rising to $4 a pound after that. Till now, the levies -- which also take bag fertiliser applications into account -- were applied to farmers running more than the equivalent of one cow per acre. But from January 1, 2000, the rules will apply to all farmers, arable as well as livestock. The P loss levies will be doubled from that date and excess N losses will be levied at the equivalent of 50 cents per pound. Just as in Germany, the sticking points are the regulations and paperwork when a farmer has to move fertiliser to another enterprise. In the Netherlands, the routine includes weighing of each wagonload at a public weighbridge and individual sampling and laboratory testing. The Dutch farmers' union (LTO) has appealed to government for a simplified formula for manure deliveries. In place of the repeated laboratory tests that the system calls for, it wants to use the farmer's assessment of the tonnage being shipped together with a standard table of N and P values for different manures and their liquidity. Actually, this more relaxed control had been allowed up until the end of 1999 for manure applications between fence-to-fence neighbours. In December, however, the Dutch agriculture and environment ministries announced that tests and weighing would continue as before -- and that the remaining loophole, the one involving the neighbours, would be stopped as from January 1. From now on, every last bucketful of manure that crosses a farm boundary has to be measured at a public weighbridge. There's something else new for 2000: the Dutch farmers who were negotiating for a relaxing of the manure laws say the government (ED: this is my interpretation of his slightly vague original) will retaliate in January by boycotting all further meetings on the subject. New century: same old story! Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany. © copyright 1999 AgMedia Co-operative Inc.. top December 1999 British retaliate with sewage story French and Germans sticking to beef import ban By Norman Dunn The farming story of the month in Europe is that a French cooperative allowed heat-treated and dried sewage to be used as a high-protein ingredient for pig and cattle feed produced in its mills and subsequently delivered to farms over a wide area. In news parlance this was a late-breaking story... very late. For the actual mixing of sewage and feed last occurred - according to the French authorities - about two years ago. When inspectors discovered the practice, it was stopped immediately. The sewage story is getting the full treatment now because there's a political trade brawl brewing in Europe, and such food-safety horror stories are ideal weapons when the sewage starts flying. The brawl? Well, it's old BSE or crazy cow disease once again. Beginning of October, the European Union health commissioners announced that the time had come to lift the 1996 ban on British beef exports, introduced because of the extent of the disease in Britain. The French government immediately claimed it was far too early to lift the ban. The disease was not yet under control. Even this year there had been some 3,000 cases of BSE reported in Britain. And the French are also claiming that their scientists have new evidence that the causative organisms, with their suspected links to Creutzfeld Jakob (CJD) brain disease in humans, were much more easily spread among meat-eaters then previously thought. It's now being claimed that causative agents could also be found in animal blood, so that consumption of meat from infected cattle, and not just brain, nerve and spinal tissue, could perhaps cause CJD in humans. There are also other challenges to accepted wisdom in the report: enough of them to encourage France to maintain its ban on British beef. Following the French stand Germany, first country to stop the import of British beef and thus usually the villain when it comes to British moans about the beef ban, immediately called a halt to its plans to allow British beef in again - imports, incidentally, that had never amounted to much more than a thousand tons per year. Reacting to the French disregard of EU instructions, the British press "found" the sewage story and used it as a prime example of Gallic "double standards". Now, that same week I happened to be taking part in a British radio program examining the whole BSE mess. There, the extent of the current national beef neurosis was highlighted when the program's anchor-lady appeared to disregard all the facts and announced that not only were all French farmers still feeding "untreated" sewage to their animals, German beef-cattle raisers, and possibly most others on the European mainland, were doing it as well.. A further curiosity of the BSE catastrophe is that no one wants to introduce a test for it in European slaughterhouses. Thirteen years after the first known cases, only the Swiss have introduced an overnight test for slaughtered cattle that can give 100% reliable notice of the disease. It's not as if there's a shortage of such tests. Another two (one developed in France and the other in Northern Ireland) have also been passed by various national health authorities as reliable. Yet another is under development. And they're not expensive. The Swiss test, which has at last also been adopted by a major slaughter concern in the German state of Westphalia, costs the equivalent of about C$30 per animal. Sounds a lot, but boil it down to a per pound cost on a typical 770 lb beast dressing out at 350 lb and it's 8.5 c per pound: peanuts. The arguments against adopting the tests range from "we're still not sure of their accuracy" (Britain) to "we don't need them because we haven't got BSE" (France and Germany). European consumers tend to the opinion that no slaughterer or beef-producer is keen on the tests because of fear that there are even more infected animals out there to be identified. As we write Britain, not the government but the general public, is moving towards a general embargo on all things French and German. Danish meat producers and Spanish winemakers are rubbing their hands. Welcome to the European "Union"! Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany. © copyright 1999 AgMedia Co-operative Inc.. top November 1, 1999 EU farmers cling to financial props Brussels wants to slash cheques to big farm By Norman Dunn The trouble with agricultural support programs is that once they're in place farmers, get to depend on them. It's got to the stage within the EU where wheat growers, for instance, say they couldn't hope to make a profit without the so-called area payment averaging around C$200 per acre. This cash comes from the EU commission in Brussels, and the commission now is under pressure to find ways of reducing this sort of support expenditure. Obviously the farmers, supported in this way for all main cereals and oilseeds, want the help to continue and it looks as if they'll get their wish in the short term. Under the Agenda 2000 agreements the direct area aid is to be increased by about 20 per cent to compensate in part for a reduction in guaranteed prices for farm products. That 20 per cent represents extra payments of around C$8 billion a year for Brussels. European taxpayers, who have to find this cash in the first place, are calling for reductions in what the man in the street sees as a free handout to farmers from the top of Finland to the toe of Italy. This point of view is not hard to understand. The media in Europe supply the city folks with lots of stories about mega-support bucks landing in the laps of comparatively large-scale farmers in certain regions of the EU: regions like East Anglia in England, where company-run cereal units of two, three or more thousand acres are not unusual. Not only do such favoured farmers regularly manage 4t/ac yields of wheat, they get a free cheque in the mail every year equivalent to at least C$200,000 for every 1,000 acres they farm. The same goes for this size of enterprise in other main cereal areas such as the Champagne in France and huge tracts of eastern Germany. There are, of course, still plenty of small-scale farmers in Europe. After all, the average unit size in the EU is only 32 acres. Very few begrudge the struggling subsistence-farming families the financial support that keeps huge areas of Europe's rural hinterland populated by stemming the retreat from the land into the big cities. It's the big ones who will probably have to say goodbye to at least some of their support. In fact, some countries are already deciding to take matters into their own hands. Modulation is the in-word among the French agricultural bureaucrats, for instance. They want to stop 100-per-cent payments of area support for farms at around either C$70,000 or C$120,000. (The threshold has not yet been decided.) After that, all acreage payments will be cut by 20 per cent. Some of the money saved is to be used for further support for farmers in "disadvantaged areas". These farmers will get extra financial support, but only if they sign a five-year contract to cut pesticide and fertilizer use according to ecological guidelines. Britain too is reported to be interested in this modulation idea. But German farmers don't see why big - and usually much more efficient - producers should be penalized. The upper French limit would normally apply to farms of 600 to 1,000 acres. "If there are going to be reductions, then we want them right across the board," one north German farmer told me. "Certainly, very small enterprises should be saved from aid reductions - anything under 100 acres. But why should medium farms of 300, 400 and 500 acres get full support and their slightly larger neighbours none? If it has to be, then I'm for a percentage cut right from the first acre." Other European nations are controlling farmer grant incomes in other ways.The Danes have simply put a limit on the size of unit that can be farmed by one person. This used to be 1,100 acres. If the new legislation is passed this year the limit will soon be 910 acres. Once again, though, units are usually much smaller, the average farm in Denmark covering just over 90 acres. Interestingly, the Danes have also put a limit on the number of cow equivalents in any one enterprise, 750, although Danish land and stocking limits are being made mainly to give aspiring young entrants a chance of getting their feet on the bottom rung of the farm ladder. Although not a member of the EU Switzerland is a country with an even more fantastic record of farm support, and this Alpine republic has already passed its own modulation laws. There, 100-per-cent arable area support, currently equivalent to C$460/acre, stops at 75 acres. For the next 120 acres Swiss growers get 70 per cent of full support and, after that, nothing. European farmers are already asking: Will Switzerland's system be the model for the next round of EU farm support changes? © copyright 1999 AgMedia Co-operative Inc..