2024-04-17 00:32:36
Where once there were colorful meadows, today there are only dandelions. The landscape has been transformed by intensive agriculture for decades, and according to botanist Stanislav Březina, it resembles the yellow sea. In addition, his book Meadows – the discovery of adventure is nominated for this year’s Magnesia Litera awards. “Today, the same thing is happening in the meadows as in the fields. They are harmed by frequent mowing,” he says in the interview.
What does a typical Czech meadow look like today?
With a bit of exaggeration, spring is yellow from dandelions. I would rather call it a field than a meadow due to the intensive farming, it is intensively mowed, fertilized and reseeded. Fortunately, we still have quite a few of the more colorful bows with bells and daisies. For example, for meze, which is chopped for long-term hay for rabbits.
But those “real” meadows, full of plant species or orchids, you usually have to go to the mountains for those, which have been affected by intensification to a lesser extent than the surrounding landscape. And there aren’t too many of them there either. Perhaps even in the White Carpathians such meadows are more common.
So in other words the meadows become less colorful. Could you explain the role of species diversity – biodiversity – in grassland communities?
The more species a meadow or other community has, the easier it is to deal with environmental changes. Each species is differently resistant to drought, wetness, to attack by various pests, and they are easier to find in a diverse community. In short, everyone can “do” something different. This is especially important in today’s era of climate extremes. Recently, this has not been most visible in meadows, but on the contrary in forests, where species-depleted spruce monocultures had more difficulty facing bark beetle raids than mixed stands. But a species-varied meadow community also provides better quality hay for farm animals, and they then have better milk.
However, species diversity is also a mystery in its own way. The most diverse areas in the world are tropical forests (for an idea, according to estimates, up to 21,000 plant species grow in the Amazon alone, editor’s note). But if we move to the level of meters, not hectares, as is done with forests, there are no more diverse communities than meadows and pastures – in short, forestless areas.
Why this is so is discussed in our book Meadows – the adventure of discovery, which summarizes the results of forty years of research by colleagues from the Botanical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. In the individual chapters, we look at various mechanisms that “can” be responsible for meadow diversity. But one key factor is absolutely essential.
What?
Mowing, in other words taking biomass. To clarify, we humans don’t see it at first glance, but meadow plants compete with each other for light and nutrients.
In an unmown meadow, one or a few “swellers” – the fastest and tallest growing plants – dominate, while other smaller herbs are lost because they are shaded and deprived of sunlight. The gap between the successful and the unsuccessful is opening up. The strongest individual has more and more, the smaller has less and less.
And mowing, I suppose, keeps the strongest plant at bay.
Yes, the taller the plant, the more mowing bothers it, because with the above-ground biomass, it loses the most effective weapon that suppresses other plants. When this crude weapon cannot be used in society, other possibilities come to the fore to assert oneself in competition with others. But there are already many of them – basically every plant can have its own.
Some sink their roots deep into the ground, other plants are satisfied with almost. The meadow is therefore a community where you don’t get ahead by brute force, but by being able to do something that others can’t. In the book, we write, among other things, about the meadow as a well-run school supporting various talents among pupils.
“oh yeah man”
But when I discussed the decline of insects with entomologists, they mentioned too frequent mowing as one of the causes.
It is true. The most beautiful meadows are in places where neither little nor much is mowed. It is ideal once or twice a year. If it is not mowed at all, the already mentioned phenomenon occurs, and the meadow would soon become overgrown with trees. On the other hand, when mowing takes place several times, not even a lot of plants and, as you rightly pointed out, animals can survive here.
But the same ratio applies to fertilization, because, for example, the Krkonoše meadows are naturally poor in nutrients. If we overfertilize them, they will mainly be dominated by dandelion plants.
It is also important to occasionally alternate mowing with grazing or change the dates of mowing. No meadow is good if it is cut at the same time for twenty years.
There is probably also a difference in the care of meadows in the past and today.
Today, large meadow areas are mowed at the same time, because farmers simply have machines that mow a huge meadow in half a day. The landscape then looks like a green lawn, where butterflies and other insects cannot find any food.
If our meadows could tell their story, what would we learn from them?
He would probably begin with a hopeful exclamation to the bow: “Behold, man!” That’s when people started cutting down the forest and making room for meadows. The forest is a natural cover on a large part of our territory, and meadows would not have been created without the contribution of man. The meadows were then maintained by balanced management, each householder was careful not to take more from it than the meadow is capable of producing.
Well, and a few decades ago, the situation changes to, “Oh yeah, man.” And that is precisely because of the increase in the intensity of farming that I mentioned at the beginning. For example, it started in Polabí as early as the 19th century, and in most of the territory it started in the second half of the 20th century. Here in the Krkonoše Mountains, the situation was even different, because after the Second World War, many meadows stopped being farmed completely and started to become overgrown with forest. Meadows therefore need adequate human care for their existence, but the word “adequate” is key.
I assume that the same thing happens in the meadows as in the fields.
Yes, I think it’s the same thing. However, it is a bit more visible in rapeseed fields, for example.
The next question is easily – what about it? How to solve it?
There are more options, some of which we will probably talk about further. Technically – not probably politically – the most effective way to influence a large area of our rural landscape with a single step would be changes in the setting of agricultural subsidies. The point is to set them up in such a way that their benefits are drawn more by nature-friendly farmers. There are many examples of good practice abroad, it is a matter of promoting them here as well.
Yellow sea
How can we enjoy the “adventure of discovery” if I use the subtitle of your book, with the little that is in the meadows?
This brings us to another possibility to change the situation. My colleagues and I sometimes take scythes and go to mow early in the morning. Not only is it a great feeling to step on the soft grass in the morning, but it also creates a relationship with nature. They soon discover that every meadow is a little different, that even the same meadow changes every year. Sometimes full of daisies, other times white from fireflies.
The farmers will be happy when I mow their entire meadow! Still learning with the scythe…
Of course, a large part of the territory is farmed by farmers, but certainly not the vast majority. There are plenty of places anyone can put their care into, not just mowing. It is enough to contact, for example, the Brontosaurus Movement, the Kosenka organization, the Czech Association of Nature Protectors or the local authority in the vicinity of our place of residence. However, it is necessary to make an agreement with the owners in advance and find out something about the situation in advance, so as not to do more harm than good.
Wouldn’t it be better to protect the meadows more? I wonder what Hugo Conwentz would say about it, whose work inspired the whole of Europe and today we have almost 2,700 nature reserves.
Of course, it is good for the meadow if it lies in a reserve or even in a national park. It reduces the risk that it will fall behind the motherland during the construction of the house or that someone will plow and sow it. But on the other hand, the meadows in the reservations also have their problems, because it is quite difficult to give them the care they were used to from their traditional owners, even in the national park today.
A good strategy for us conservationists is, first of all, to preserve the best of the meadows that we still have here – for example, the most beautiful Krkonoše or White Carpathian meadows. If we once lose these top-quality stands, it will most likely be irreversible.
And isn’t it a problem that we’ve focused on protecting reservations and turned a blind eye to what’s happening in the rest of the territory?
Complete agreement. At the same time, it is good to try to do something with those dandelion meadows in the open countryside. The idea that our landscape will function in the long term with exaggeration as a yellow ocean of canola and dandelions, in which there will be hectares of reserves with a lot of protected species, is illusory.
Nature, like society, does not function as a closed system, for it the interconnectedness of individual biotopes is key. The regulation on the restoration of nature, which is widely discussed these days, could help with this. As the ecologist Vojtěch Kotecký recently spoke very nicely in an interview for Deník N – every hectare of rural landscape with adequate, not too intensive farming counts.