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The EU is struggling to hit Green Deal nutrient reduction targets and keep farmers happy; Australia may need to take notice soon.
In Europe we are already seeing what it looks like to confront lofty, environmental goals while facing crisis after crisis. The current commission in Europe is led by President Ursula Von der Leyen, who introduced the European Green Deal as one of its’ main political guidelines designed to set Europe on the path of carbon neutrality. It has since been placed under significant scrutiny due to many of its goals being too challenging to attain and its slow implementation.
While in Australia, the latest agricultural overview by ABARES has shown that Australian agriculture production and its environmental sustainability have benefited from an era of good fortune and are in an internationally enviable place.
Despite this, heavy inflation continues to hike up food prices and customers are searching for cheaper alternatives wherever they can, reducing profits for those working in the agricultural industry.
Australian farmers are also looking down the barrel of a dry winter/spring period due to a looming El Niño exacerbated by a positive Indian Ocean Dimple (IOD).
This, coupled with the global anxiety of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is enough to make even the toughest Aussie farmers sweat and look to Europe to see how they are getting on.
Some of the targets of the Green Deal in particular are of great concern to European farmers. In the Farm to Fork strategy(F2F), the agricultural component of the Green Deal, there is a goal of reducing fertiliser use 20% by 2030 and this is sparking debate from around the industry.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in 2020 the total EU fertiliser consumption almost doubled that of Australia’s.
Fertilisers provide essential nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium to crops to maximise their growth. Nitrogen is the most dangerous of these according to Sylvain Pellerin, French researcher at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment.
When used in excess they pollute the soil, drain into, and contaminate ground and surface water and create nitrous oxide a greenhouse gas 310 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Farmers will often put in excess fertiliser to be more safe than sorry and ensure there is enough to achieve the maximum yield possible.
Why the EU is struggling, do farmers need to take a cut?
This dogmatic mentality is recognised as well by Celia Nyssens, The Policy Manager for Agriculture and Food Systems at the European Environmental Bureau.
She states that there is a “mainstream conventional idea of what agriculture is for, still dominant with farmers and some parts of the commission, to produce as much as possible. And for that we need fertilisers and then we export as much as possible as we produce”
With the less favourable conditions forecasted in Australia soon, farmers here may be tempted to increase their fertiliser consumption to protect their yields as well.
But this is harmful and unnecessary, farmers can save money by applying less nutrients and still get the same yields because they give only as much nutrition to their crops as they need.
“The mere fact that we are losing nutrients to the environment means that we are applying too many nutrients and that we are wasting them”.
To Celia, there may be a need for some farmers to actually change their entire system, this could be through organic farming, soil restoration conservation agriculture or regenerative agriculture. “This isn’t some hippy stuff, it’s soil science and biology”.
Whatever they do, the most important thing is that farmers are supported during their transition away from intensive mineral fertilising as there is usually a drop in yields for the first few years before farmers “start to reap the benefits”.
The F2F strategy so far has not provided appropriate support to help farmers through this though. Celia stated that the commission recently “put forward a communication on fertilisers which essentially threw a lot of money at the problem in an unhelpful way, it allowed member states to spend tons of money on subsidising the fertiliser industry without any strings attached, paying very little attention to the long-term environmental dimension of the problem”.
This is an issue that Stiig Markager, Professor at Aarhus University, Institute of Bioscience sees in Denmark as well.
“It is my conclusion that is actually the EU’s money which is causing the biggest environmental and climate problem we have”.
He states that the EU farm subsidies result in even the poorest soils being farmed because it entitles you to EU support. These soils are often waterlocked, contain high organic matter and also leach nitrogen into the aquatic environment. “We are farming land that is not suitable for farming”.
It is clear the F2F initiative has done little extra to help achieve the targets set within it of reducing these harmful nutrients. Celia stated that “there has not been any talk of integrating that target in any legislative text, but the same goal has existed for decades as part of the Water Framework Directive” (WFD), which requires member states to achieve a good status of water quality by 2027.
In Denmark, they need to reduce nitrogen losses by 30% or 38 000 tonnes to meet the standards of the WFD and Professor Markager’s says that the only way they can achieve this is by taking 15% of their farming land out of production.
The most recent analysis in the Netherlands, which suffers from the worst water quality standards in the EU, show that it is already too late for them to achieve the targets of the WFD.
Frank Van Gaalen from Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency attributes this to their dense population, intensive agriculture and other industry practices, and uncoordinated water quality goals amongst high polluting, neighbouring countries such as Germany and Belgium.
Paul Begijn from Dutch environmental organisation Natuurmonumenten, states that “We have to seek cooperation with farmers and water boards and make it clear that we have a common interest instead of blaming each other. People think that nature organizations and farmers are miles apart, but we can be allies.”
Alternative Farming Practices
According to Ida Lind, expert of market and sustainability at the non-profit eco-farmer organisation Ekologiska Lantbrukarna, the discussion on fertiliser reduction is not so prominent in Sweden.
The consumption level of fertilisers is comparatively low to the rest of Europe, and they are “on track to meeting the targets of the F2F initiative”. They generally see the other countries around the Baltic Sea as the high polluters and organic farmers especially are not worried about reaching the F2F targets as “they feel they already use at least 50% less fertilisers than non-organic farmers”.
However, the organic food boom has plateaued in Sweden and retailers have decided to stop promoting these foods as much. Also, “last year the increase in food prices means that people try to find cheaper food when they go grocery shopping which means the organic sales have dropped even more”.
This affects these farmers livelihoods and is slowly resulting in a reduction in organic farmland.
“organic farmers are leaving to become conventional again, because then they can use more fertilisers which means they will get higher yields”.
“Last year 3% of the farmers went conventional again and we think even more will leave this year”.
Do We Still Need Mineral Fertilisers?
Cecilia Dardes, the Agriculture and Environment Manager at Fertilizers Europe which “represents the interests of the majority of mineral fertilizer manufacturers in the European Union” recently published an article in Euractiv advocating for “an enabling policy framework”. She writes that mineral fertilisers are needed in conjunction with organic fertilisers and their use should be optimised with modern technology and a “harmonized measuring unit” to reduce nutrient losses to the environment, be profitable to farmers and ensure food security.
Author: Tobias Alexander
Karlijn Frederique Stenvers, Inken Thiel, Suzanna de Vries, Apolline Le Romanser and Emilie Andrieux contributed to this investigation. This work was carried out within the framework of the " Cross, border Journalism Campus ", an Erasmus+ project bringing together three journalism schools: the Paris Journalists Training Center (France), the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and the University from Leipzig (Germany) .