Poor soil can be upgraded to good farmland or left to nature. The dichotomy can be seen in a plot of land in Gossau.
Farming land is not lost everywhere where excavators are at work: Sometimes, like here years ago between Kloten and Embrach, good farmland is created on bad ground.
A farmer harvests the dried hay with a machine. In the meantime, around 25 storks are cavorting in the meadow around him, attracted by nutritious insects. They are particularly interested in locusts. One of the proud birds does not disdain the mouse, which it catches with its long beak and swallows alive.
The Moos area, east of Gossau in a slight depression, is anything but unusual. But it is still the subject of a long-standing legal dispute. The core question is how to deal with inferior farmland: more agriculture or more nature conservation?
The property in Gossau was once a wetland that was drained with drainage. But these cables have a limited lifespan. The subsoil has now partially subsided, and after a lot of rain the country is always partly under water.
The meadow and the adjacent stubble field are therefore not very productive from an agricultural point of view. In such cases, an improvement is possible in very different ways: Either earth is heaped up at great expense and the property is upgraded to good arable land with a layer of humus. Or you do nothing and at best even remove the drainage systems: Then the area will regenerate over time and gradually become a wetland again. Gossau is about weighing up these paths.
Potential area for renaturation
Geoplan Swiss, a company specializing in soil improvement in Wollerau in Schwyz, submitted an application for their project to agriculturally upgrade an area of more than seven hectares, which corresponds to around ten football pitches. In 2020, however, the cantonal building department refused the permit. The Zurich administrative court, like the building appeals court before it in the first instance, has now confirmed this decision in accordance with a recently published judgment.
The courts thus support the attitude of the canton, which the property in Gossau as “priority potential area for wetlands” grades. The term is relatively new. In 2021, the cantonal Office for Landscape and Nature (ALN) designated numerous such areas, which together cover 1,300 hectares in the canton of Zurich. The goal is to gain a species-rich habitat in this way, which is crucial for the preservation of biodiversity.
Nothing will happen to these potential areas for the time being. Conversely, however, this means that agricultural soil improvement is no longer approved here and, with a few exceptions, no subsidies are paid for the rehabilitation or replacement of drains.
The opposing interests, here producing agriculture, since the promotion of biodiversity, are both located in the Office for Landscape and Nature. These are equally weighted orders in the office’s heterogeneous list of tasks, writes its boss Marco Pezzatti on request. Balancing these interests is part of day-to-day business.
Politically, however, the question is highly controversial. In recent years, the conflict between agriculture and nature conservation has mainly been sparked by the revitalization of watercourses, which often falls victim to cultivated land. This conflict is likely to be one of the most controversial points in the cantonal council’s new attempt at a water law.
With the potential areas for regeneration, there is another topic that is becoming more explosive with the global food crisis as a result of the Ukraine war. Before the summer holidays, two parliamentary initiatives were submitted by the ranks of the SVP/EDU parliamentary group in the cantonal council: one for the long-term preservation of drainage in agricultural soils, one for the protection of the productive cultural layer.
From a scientific point of view, however, the facts support the position of the ALN. It is true that good arable land, so-called crop rotation areas, are scarce in the canton of Zurich. It only just meets the target of 44,400 hectares defined by the federal government. Good agricultural land is constantly being lost due to construction activity, which is why soil improvement is definitely an issue.
However, the state of nature is worse. In order to preserve biodiversity, according to the canton’s overall nature conservation concept, 1,300 additional moorland areas are needed in addition to the 1,800 hectares of existing moorland biotopes. 150 hectares of it should be restored by 2025, wrote the government council in 2020 in response to a request from parliament. For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that the situation with the rough meadows is even more precarious. There is a major deficit in habitats, the government concluded, and the state of biodiversity in the canton of Zurich is worrying.
The administrative court rates both interests, agriculture and biodiversity, as equally high. In this specific case, it gives more weight to the regenerative capacity of the Moos area and emphasizes its importance as a “stepping stone” for networking with three nearby wetlands in Gossau. The arguments of Geoplan Swiss, on the other hand, are not valid enough, it says in the justification.
Gossau fears dust and noise
The ALN boss Pezzatti does not comment on the verdict because the other side has already appealed it to the federal court. From a professional point of view, he adds that agricultural management is retained and that the weighing of interests has to be carried out anew in all similar cases.
The moss example also shows the extent of terrain changes that soil improvement entails. Geoplan Swiss envisages a bank up to a height of more than 5 meters. The reason: the terrain should be designed in such a way that the water drains off and the artificial drainage can be reduced to a minimum. In this specific case, this means that the newly gained farmland should rise slightly towards the nearby hill, which requires a large volume.
The business model behind it is not just about improving soil quality for agriculture. In this way, the company can, for a fee, use clean excavated material from the brisk construction activity in the region.
According to Pezzatti, however, the principle applies to only allow as much soil application as necessary and to preserve the character of the landscape. Geoplan Swiss, which operates primarily in the Zurich Oberland, completed another project in Gossau in 2020 that was just over half the size of the one it is planning in Moos. Although a good 33,000 square meters of new crop rotation area were created, 45,700 cubic meters of excavated material and over 11,000 cubic meters of subsoil were also removed.
This gives an idea of how many truck trips are necessary in the roughly two-year construction period. No wonder the project is not wanted by the third party, the municipality of Gossau. The canton is currently planning two landfills on its territory, which is why the term is an emotive term here. When asked, local councilor Daniel Baldenweg, responsible for planning and building construction, explains that soil improvement cannot be equated with a landfill.
However, the very massive embankment in the immediate vicinity of the settlement area results in an unacceptable impairment of the quality of life due to noise, dust and traffic. For Gossau, according to Baldenweg, only a significantly reduced and significantly less high level of soil improvement is possible, if at all.
Judgment VB.2021.00637 of May 12, 2022, not final.