The mobilization of farmers, in particular to demand better remuneration, was an opportunity to highlight the problem of hedges, which are struggling to regain their reputation.
Faced with the crises facing the agricultural world, are hedges part of the problem or the solution? Protected in the name of the services they provide in the fight against the collapse of biodiversity and their capacity to protect crops from climatic hazards, these rows of trees and shrubs are, for certain land professionals, the allies of a necessary agricultural revolution. For others, hedges are obstacles to cultivating in a straight line, which only shelter brush and troubles.
While the Agricultural Show opened on Saturday February 24 in Paris and runs until March 3, hedges crystallize both the hopes and frustrations of farmers in search of landmarks.
The hedges of discord
Two farmers from Deux-Sèvres sentenced to pay more than 20,000 euros to a municipality for the uprooting of nearly a kilometer of hedges on a classified site, along a municipal road. Another near Nantes (Loire-Atlantique), which, as reported West France, receives a suspended fine of 3,000 euros for having razed 700 meters of bocage hedge, “beginning of the nesting period for finches, nightingales and other robins”. A farmer ordered to answer before the Angers court for the destruction of 450 meters of hedges “where tawny owls and great capricorns lived”in Maine-et-Loire… In the pages of the local press, reports of hearings of this kind follow one another.
These stories fuel the anger of the majority union, the FNSEA. Its president in Orne, Sylvain Delye, denounced at the end of January on France Bleu the role in this system of the French Biodiversity Office, created in 2020 to monitor compliance with environmental rules. He described a “environmental police”a “flagrant police” has “the authoritarian attitude”. “We find ourselves in interrogations which last half a day with two armed people in front of you. All this because you cut a piece of hedge or blocked a hole which for them was a pond”, the cattle breeder still cursed. “HAS wonder if these laws were made to destroy rurality or preserve biodiversity”, he said, adding to the farmers’ economic demands the union’s grievances with regard to the legislative arsenal on which environmental policy is based.
Because the continued disappearance of hedges since the post-war period now poses a problem which goes beyond the framework of agriculture: that of resilience of territories in the face of the observed consequences of climate change and the collapse of biodiversity. They are thus regularly presented as an agronomic tool for adapting the agricultural model, as in this January report from the High Council for the Climate dedicated to agriculture. However, since the green revolution and France’s entry into the era of intensive land consolidation – the grouping of plots – the country has lost 70% of its hedge areas. If this policy ended in the 1980s, more than 20,000 kilometers of hedges are still lost each year, of which 5,000 are uprooted by communities or farmers and 15,000 die out due to lack of maintenance, according to a ministerial report published in April.
“For generations, farmers were told that hedges were useless,” deplores Philippe Hirou, president of Afac-Agroforesteries.
“The misconception that keeping a hedge means losing money still persists today.”
Philippe Hirou, president of Afac-Agroforesteriesat franceinfo
Areas incapable of producing, hedges have only been taken into account in the criteria of the common agricultural policy (CAP) opening up to possible subsidies since 2014. Ten years later, farmers can benefit from a “hedge bonus” of seven euros per hectare and are prohibited from pruning agricultural hedges and trees between March 16 and August 15, the bird nesting period.
A renewed interest hampered by regulations
Despite this change of direction, why do farmers continue to uproot these shrubs? Quoted at the end of January by AFP, the president of the FNSEA, Arnaud Rousseau, castigates these same rules supposed to preserve them: “Because there are 14 regulatory texts, even though everyone recognizes the virtues of hedges against erosion, for biodiversity, etc.”, he argues. In a speech on January 26,Prime Minister Gabriel Attal took this figure into account, promising that these texts would soon merge into a single regulation.
Farmers who want to work on hedges must obtain the agreement of the Departmental Territorial Directorate (DDT). The intervention must meet the criteria set by common law which, depending on the location where the operation is located, refers to the Heritage Code, town planning, public health, the environment or even the Code rural, summarizes the professional site Réussir. If he confirms problems of coherence between certain texts, Philippe Hérou nuances: “There are four or five rules that really apply to hedge management. But they maintain the idea that if you have hedges, then people will come and bother you, looking for the slightest fault. Somehow, if you don’t do anything, at least you’ll be left alone.” he continues.
Especially since, in the same way that a tree does not emerge overnight, subsidies are sometimes delayed. “Many people who have kept hedges feel that they are not valued,” continues the president of Afac-Agroforesteries. “I know a farmer who has been waiting for three years to receive CAP money for magro-environmental and climatic measures“, he regrets, calling for “work towards greater readability”, particularly in the procedures required of farmers. As for the “hedges bonus”, set at 7 euros per hectare by the CAP, he believes that it should be closer to 25 euros to attract the support of as many people as possible.
Access to one-off aid for planting hedges and trees is hardly clearer: they are sometimes distributed by the department and the chamber of agriculture, sometimes by the region, the State, etc. It is also difficult to assess their results from one territory to another. Thus, it is currently impossible to know whether the “Let’s plant hedges” initiative, resulting from the France Relance plan, has achieved its objective of sustainably planting 7,000 kilometers of linear space in two years. As to Pact in favor of hedges, supported by the Ministry of Agriculture and with a budget of 110 million euros, it must come into force in 2024, with the ambition of a net gain of 50,000 kilometers of hedges by 2030.
A new model that still divides
Marc Deconchat, agronomist atNational Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Inrae) and a specialist in bocage hedges, is aware of the reluctance expressed in the field regarding this return to favor with the appearance of fashion effects. “No time, no equipment, no know-how, no interest… CSome farmers tell us very simply: ‘It’s not my job'”, explains the specialist. “Money without support is of little use”, agrees Philippe Hirou. He hopes that the incentives will be accompanied by the creation of a wood industry capable of making these hedges real economic assets for farms.
Corinne Bloch is already convinced. The hedges, cut and transformed into wooden chips, allowed this Charolais cow breeder based in Alsace to do without fertilizer. She has also resolved her fodder problems, she lists, praising the resilience of her farm in the face of recent weather episodes. “It was 40°C in the shade, we experienced three droughts in a row, enough to put us out of business,” she explains. “How, when these new problems have emerged, can we continue to practice grandfather’s agriculture, dependent on fertilizers and phytochemicals, which has run out of steam?” she is surprised, convinced that “agroforestry is the most modern practice today”.
She believes that the conditions that farmers face will end up re-imposing hedges on farms, regardless of the reluctance. To the argument of an increase in the amount of work, it responds by saving time. And money. Here again. “Our hedges are such a wealth, it’s like standing oil,” jokes the breeder, converted to agroforestry five years ago. “We prune, it grows back, they always offer us more.” Thus, Corinne Bloch does not consider that we must make a clean slate of the conventional practices of the past: “No, what we need is to help agriculture finally regenerate. Like a tree!”
Because resistance is also the result of a deep division within the profession, notes Marc Deconchat, from Inrae. It translates, through the question of hedges, “a false opposition between the defenders of progressive agriculture and those who advocate a return to ancestral practices“, he explains. “Symbol of an orientation of its agricultural activity”, hedges are also the sign, visible from the roads, of a political divide. “Some explained to us that they did not want to participate in hedge planting operations because it would mark them as being in favor of ecology, even if they know the advantages and benefits that it can have elsewhere. “reports the agronomist.
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