Michael Maly is fighting for better soil. Passionately and with conviction. Although he turned 80 on Thursday, he chose to give a lecture at the Straubing Sustainability Talks instead of celebrating his birthday. The topic is simply important to him, says Maly. This Thursday, a lecture hall on the TUM campus on Uferstraße will focus on sustainable land use.
The former director of the Office for Agriculture and Soil Culture in Regensburg has been committed to soil conservation his entire life. ‘We lost a lot of agriculture when the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal was built,’ he says. He also fought against the BMW plant in Regensburg at the time. And now, urban development could also extend to the fertile soils of the Gäuboden with the continued construction of the B15neu motorway around Neutraubling. Unsurprisingly, he is also critical of the construction of the battery assembly plant near Straßkirchen.
That is why Maly founded the Alliance for the Preservation of Bavaria's Best Soils (BBBB) at the end of 2022. For him, one thing is clear: ‘We have water protection areas, we have nature reserves – we also need soil protection areas.’ In Germany, around half of the land is used for agriculture. However, this proportion is shrinking continuously, from 51.1 per cent in 2016 to 50.4 per cent in 2022, according to the Federal Statistical Office. 2,430 square kilometres of usable land were lost during this period. At the same time, the area used for settlements and transport increased by 2,648 square kilometres.
Self-sufficiency must be ensured
For Maly, ensuring self-sufficiency in food is the top priority in the fight for land. Added to this is sustainability: no more intensive farming, less fertiliser, fewer pesticides and measures to promote biodiversity. Maly says that self-sufficiency is achievable. However, if we want to convert to organic farming in part by 2050 and also set aside ten percent of the land for biodiversity, ‘then it will be tight.’
Then “renewable raw materials would have to be sacrificed in part,” according to Maly's answer, which is probably not very popular in Straubing. In his view, energy crops for the production of biogas and biofuels in particular take up too much arable land (currently 16 per cent), are not very effective and are too expensive. That is why they are heavily subsidised. Maly also sees huge reserves in reducing meat consumption. This is because meat production requires about ten times as much energy as other foods.
‘Everyone has made mistakes,’ says soil conservationist Maly, looking back on the past decades: land consolidation in drainage, forestry in spruce monocultures, agriculture in erosion, pollutants and biodiversity, politics in land consumption and the development of Bavaria's best soils. His appeal: ’Let's do better in the future and protect our livelihoods.’
Criticism of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)
This goal also unites the participants in the subsequent discussion round. When asked about the Free State's target of reducing land consumption to five hectares per day by 2030, which is still far from being achieved, CSU member of the state parliament Petra Högl argues that the municipalities ultimately have planning authority. Green politician Maria Krieger added that municipalities must ensure that they can finance their diverse tasks. And that happens primarily through trade tax. This is fundamentally how it is designed, but it could possibly be changed.
Former farmers' president Gerd Sonnleitner explained that agricultural businesses must grow in order to survive. However, construction projects and the necessary compensation areas meant that land was also lost to agriculture. He therefore proposes that industrial wasteland be recultivated and that building be made more compact in order to make use of such compensation areas. Agricultural expert Harald Ulmer from the Bund Naturschutz (Nature Conservation Union) lamented a general flaw in the system: ‘Why do we treat land and agriculture in exactly the same way as any other product?’ Agriculture has a much greater function and significance for society than just food production. Only with this argument will society be prepared to spend more money. His words were met with loud applause from the audience, most of whom were farmers themselves. In an open question and answer session, some also complained about the increasingly poor financing and remuneration of agricultural services, which is regulated by the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Ultimately, all panel participants agreed that this needs to be simplified.
The randomness is missing from today's landscape
The landscape has always been marked by profound change, and humans have always intervened to cultivate it: through various forms of land use, settlement, road construction, breeding, soil cultivation and the extraction of raw materials. According to Professor Werner Konold, who held the Chair of Landscape Management at the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Freiburg until 2016, we should not romanticise these old interventions: they were often processes ‘that we would today describe as completely unsustainable’. However, there is ample evidence of the great diversity and ‘the uniqueness and beauty at all levels of biodiversity that has been created through cultivation,’ even if this sometimes only became apparent after some time. Konold calls it a ‘space-time dynamic characterised by back and forth, here and there, and both-and.’ This diversity was almost never planned: ‘It was driven by use and was accidental, a side effect, so to speak.’
For the agricultural engineer, this is the key to how we must continue to develop our landscape. Instead of random structures, today we have large-scale uniformity, permanent intensive use (through fertilisation), ever-increasing spatial precision, separation, and the high frequency and simultaneity of interventions. Everything must be predictable, and attempts are made to minimise the randomness of landscape development. Konold therefore proposes breaking down sharp boundaries and mixing land uses again, for example through agroforestry with trees and shrubs between fields or the expansion of grazing.
Fields and meadows could be laid out in strips and crop rotations extended. New mixed crops would also increase biodiversity: according to Konold, pole beans could be sown alongside silage maize, which the maize plants would then use as climbing poles. This would provide a greater supply of flowers, additional biomass and the legumes would also bind nitrogen in the soil. Unused structures such as field margins, wedges or riparian strips would increase biodiversity and improve the permeability of the landscape. Konold also believes that moors should be given greater attention again.
