Meeting with farmers from Luna de Jos

During the seminar in Luna de Jos, we presented the pilot programme for mowing in the areas of interest. The meeting was attended by over 40 persons who own land in the two selected hay meadows. After our presentation about the Mozaic Project, the Maculinea butterflies and their habitats as well as the pilot programme, a lively discussion emerged.

An important question for the farmers was, if our reward for mowing and the subventions within the Romanian Rural Development Programme (RDP) are mutually exclusive, which is not the case.

We could see for ourselves during the meeting, that at least in one hay meadow (Fânaţ Domnesc, "Nobel's Meadow") most of the parcels have less than 0.3 ha, a fact, which excludes them from RDP-subventions. We would like to include this meadow in our pilot programme all the same, because from a nature conservation point of view mowing is strongly recommended. One possibility to deal with this situation would be that the farmers make arrangements among themselves such that contracts can be closed for larger parcels.

Even if there are enough farmers who would like to participate in the pilot programme, many of them physically are not able to do the mowing on the steep slopes, not to mention manually. This problem can be solved together with the mayor's office by enabling organized teams of persons who could take over the mowing.

A conclusion of the meeting would be that we are yet to arrive at some agreements with the locals and the mayor's office; however we got off to a good start for the commune of Dăbâca and we are happy about the interest and willingness to cooperate of the farmers. We also want to express our gratitude to the mayor of Dăbâca's office for helping us to carry out this meeting, especially to the agriculture agent Mrs. Lydia Ielşan and to the deputy mayor Mr. Ioan Buia who took over the organization of the project.

From the Mozaic team the following members were involved in the meeting: Marius Bărbos, Roxana Negoiţă, Inge Paulini, Răzvan Popa and Natalia Timuş. Pleas take a look at the pictures from the seminar in our photo gallery.