A new biodiverse agenda for agriculture

The proposal for the EU's new agricultural policy is now ready, and the work with the final design of the Danish schemes is in full swing, which we notice in our policy support orders, especially with focus areas such as "Green transition with biomass" and "Agricultural reforms and public green goods".

In total, agricultural schemes take up about a third of the EU's huge € 8000 billion budget for the next seven years, and 20% of agricultural support will go to the so-called ECO schemes, which will be used to improve the environment, ensure biodiversity, and combat climate change. 

In this sense, it is a rather significant shift, where agriculture is increasingly thought of as something other than food production, and where there is also a focus on the long list of other benefits that can be achieved through a sustainable conversion of agriculture. One of the areas where we will see significantly greater activity over the coming years is around agriculture and biodiversity. The new agenda, focuses on both:

• nature integration (so-called land sharing), where the interaction between agriculture and nature is integrated on the same land use area, and
• nature reservation (so-called land sparring, or segregation), where larger areas are completely taken out of production and reserved for nature areas, with the possibility that agriculture on the remaining area is simultaneously intensified. 

There is great interest in  gathering now knowlegde, and through a special grant from the Danish Agency for Agriculture the various possibilities for initiatives in a new catalog of “Biodiversity instruments on agricultural and afforestation areas” is currently being reviewed and will be delivered in mid-November. The Department of Agroecology leads the work in close collaboration with the Department of Bioscience at Aarhus University , the Department of Geosciences and Nature Management, and the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. We at the Department of Agroecology have also conducted a national questionnaire survey, which maps farmers' interest in the various instruments and increased protection of biodiversity in the agricultural land.

The work with biodiversity instruments is linked to a large number of other current and expected future policy support orders. This applies i.a. in relation to the debated set-aside of agricultural land, not least in relation to the lowland soils, but also in relation to interaction with changed forms of farming such as forestry, conservation agriculture, pesticide-free operation, organic farming and in general so-called more nature-based production (Nature Based Farming), and the resulting effects on both environmental, climate and production efficiency, as well as resilience to the major changes seen on the horizon. These are certainly also areas where research efforts in these years are greatly expanded. For example, this month we will start our 4-year MIXED - H2020 Research and Innovation Action project, which is coordinated by the Department of Agroecology in collaboration with the International Center for Research in Organic Agriculture and Food Systems, ICROFS, with case studies in 10 different European countries.

At the same time, we have also just won a 6-year Novo Nordisk Challenge Program grant for a new NAT-TECH SustainScapes - Center for Sustainable Landscapes under Global Change, which in collaboration with the recently announced National Center for Sustainable Transformation of Agriculture (GRAIN) can become important focal points for the further development of the field. (Read more here). 

We can only rejoice over the growth we see here, and that bodes well for the further development of the department. It is a pleasure to experience the great interest seen in the teaching from both Danish and international students, where the effects of the EU's new agricultural reform and the Green Deal's huge investment are important topics. But it is also the students who must develop their lives and careers in and with the more sustainable future that we can help to create.