"Taking both into account – land and material flows"

Bettina Dyttrich is editor of the weekly newspaper WOZ, where she specialises in ecology, agriculture and social policy. She also writes non-fiction and literary texts. Bettina has long been involved in the movement for solidarity-based agriculture. In 2015, she published the book "Together in the field. Solidarity-based agriculture in Switzerland".

My mother was a farmer's child. I learnt about the plants in the area from her. Which berries are good. That you can eat wood sorrel. Thanks to her, even as a child I understood how radically agriculture had changed in just a few decades. I only had to compare my uncle's farm – with Eternit (fibre cement), concrete and a large tarred field - and the meadow in front of the door covered in sewage sludge with what she had told me about the past: horse-drawn carts, farmhands and maids, daisies in the meadows. 

My father came from the big city. In Switzerland, he discovered his passion for plants and familiarised himself so thoroughly that he later taught field botany courses. I learnt to identify alpine flowers and plan mountain hikes from him. And I probably also learnt as a child that the agricultural view and the nature conservation view are very different. One asks: What can be grown here? The other asks: What rare species live here?

The relationship between farmers and wild plants and animals has never been harmonious: they are competitors and can threaten the harvest. Nevertheless, until the middle of the 20th century, until the great upheaval that my mother witnessed, there was room for a wide variety of wild species in the cultivated landscape. It was only with pesticides, artificial fertilisers, and excessive imports of animal feed and machinery that cleared large areas of the landscape that agriculture was able to cause real damage to biodiversity - both at home and abroad.

Biodiversity damage outsourced

The view of nature conservation is incomplete. It concentrates on the visible areas. This is understandable: biodiversity needs landscapes, and species live in a specific place - or not. But a large proportion of resource flows have become invisible: Fossil fuels and animal feed, and a large proportion of consumer goods are imported. According to the Federal Office for the Environment, 70 per cent of the biodiversity damage for which Switzerland is responsible currently takes place abroad. We could increase this figure even further if we placed the whole of Switzerland under nature conservation and imported almost all of our food - we would be rich enough. But if consumer behaviour didn't change otherwise, the ecological balance would only look good at first glance: if you only look at Switzerland and ignore the rest of the world.

However, the view of "producing farmers" is just as incomplete. They like to talk about a high degree of self-sufficiency and independence from abroad. But they ignore the extent to which their production methods are dependent on imported inputs: fossil fuels and fertilisers, feed and pesticides, peat, seedlings and chicken genetics. "Production agriculture", with its cleared landscapes and far too much animal production, is itself a product of consumer society: farmers in pre-fossil fuel times would have shaken their heads at so much waste of resources. 

Looking at the big picture

If you really want to do something for biodiversity, you have to consider both: the areas and the material flows. Switzerland and imports. Plant hedges, maintain species-rich grassland, herbaceous fringes and wetlands: This is all important. But it is just as important to avoid waste and radically reduce transport, the consumption of fossil fuels, meat consumption and environmentally harmful imports - because all of this also harms biodiversity, simply less visibly.

So we can only move towards a circular economy. And organic farmers are experts in this. They see both the landscape and the resources every day. The meadows, the fields, the trees; the water, the diesel, the seeds, the manure. They see more clearly than most how everything is connected. 

Further information

Current articles on agriculture and biodiversity by Bettina Dyttrich (in German)

• woz.ch: Arbeit an der Landschaft für alle
• woz.ch: Vielfalt braucht andere Strukturen
• woz.ch: Mit Enten und Hermelinen als Helfer
• woz.ch: "Dieses System hatte nie das Wohl der Bauern im Sinn"
• woz.ch: "Der Boden ist zu kostbar"
• woz.ch: Ein Ritter für alle

Book on solidarity-based agriculture (also in German)

rotpunktverlag.ch: Gemeinsam auf dem Acker