The floods in Saarland have rendered fruit and vegetables unusable and caused damage to the upcoming potato, corn and grass harvest.
The devastating floods in Saarland are causing significant crop losses. Fruit and vegetable farmers in particular, but also farmers with green spaces, are affected. The President of the Chamber of Agriculture for Saarland, Erhard Ecker, expects that more than 300 of the approximately 1,100 farms will be affected by the consequences of the damage.
The grass has become completely unusable because it is contamination with heating oil, faeces, sand and soil, making it unsuitable as animal feed and is not accepted by the biogas plants. The Chamber and the Farmers’ Association now hope that nature conservation requirements will be suspended to allow a second hay harvest.
Damage is still being recorded
There were positive signs from the state’s Ministry of Environment and Agriculture: “Wherever the state can, we are committed to relaxing the management rules,” spokesman Matthias Weber told the German Press Agency. For example, with regard to mowing times on agricultural land in existing protected areas.
In order to quantify the economic consequences of the floods for agriculture, however, all damage must first be recorded. The ministry suspects that there could be “large losses of grassland and maize areas”.
Financial losses are not only suffered by farmers who have lost their hay harvest, but also by those farmers who can no longer find buyers for their products – for example lettuce and strawberries. “Fruit and vegetables are so contaminated that they are no longer accepted by retailers,” said the managing director of the Saar Farmers’ Association, Alexander Welsch.
Source: Stern
