Farming for Nature - Providing herdsman a decent living
Raymond Schrijver of the agricultural economic institute LEI:
‘There is a paradigm shift in nature management. More and more farmers are getting involved in nature management and by doing so it becomes possible to move from the management of separate plots to developing smart business systems that not only look into the financial income, the agricultural practice and the ecological effects, but to the farming system as a whole.
In the Netherlands we developed the concept of Farming for Nature. Starting point with this kind of farming system is a self-contained management system. The farmer cannot buy concentrates, roughage or any kind of fertilyzer, so he uses his manure within his own farm. He also develops services as nature management, recreation facilities and activities and sometimes water management. In exchange Farming for Nature organises a financial fund from the surrounding region, which provides an income for the farmer. We have pilots in polder Biesland near Delft and estate Twickel near Delden, and the European Commission recently gave the green light for the income compensation via the fund.
Within Lifescape we look at four projects. We for instance work together with Lifescape partner the municipality of Boxtel that wants to realize a farm estate, De Bleek. There farmland is turned into a nature area, en in order to compensate the farmer for the deprivation of his land value - about 25 thousand euro per hectare - the municipality allows the farmer to build landscape friendly houses on the estate. The interesting issue here is that the farm estate concept allows combining farming in a thirty hectare farm with the management of a thousand hectare of heath land of the Kampina nature reserve. The presence of that nature reserve is of vital importance for the extensive beef producing farm, whereas the private arable land outside the nature area is important to grow sufficient fodder crops.‘
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