Maintaining Biodiversity with Horses – part 1
Maintaining Biodiversity with Horses – part 1
by Paul Schmit of Luxembourg
The Farmers and Albert Einstein
Let us look at the two first pictures in this article and let them sink in for a while.
What do we discover?
In the first picture we see an intact rural landscape. The author’s Dadant beehives, some of them were having the supers full of honey. The first harvest is called “milles fleurs” as it’s supposed that the bees collect the nectar from “thousand flowers” and the light-colored honey thus consists of a mixture of a multitude of sweet ingredients. During the late summer the honeydew in the forest sometimes allows a second harvest of a dark and more aromatic honey. The smaller beehives host the “youngsters,” newly created nucleus with a young queen, representing the start-up capital for the coming season. The beehives are surrounded by apple and damson trees in an extensively cultivated orchard, promising a rich fruit crop in the next autumn. Further in the background our team hitch of Ardennes is bringing in round bales of hay, their fodder for the next winter.
In the second picture we can see the same horses and the same people involved, but in a totally different landscape, being on the opposite side of our village Téinten. These open fields are used for growing maize, mainly in monoculture, to feed large herds of cattle. A part of the maize is also transported with gigantic farm dumpers to a biogas plant, a dozen kilometers away from our village where the organic mass is fermented in order to produce heat and electricity by burning the methane gas in stationary diesel engines. Sometimes you can hear the shrill of the big self-propelled choppers day and night. There is definitely no place any more for the elements shown in the first picture. For the past couple of years the farmers have even tended to raise two crops per year in these fields. A green corn which is chopped in late May, followed immediately by maize planting, which allows the choppers to run another time in October.
It’s obvious that this farming strategy does works only with a massive use of herbicides and fungicides, as well as chemical fertilizer. This approach isn’t called into question at all by the farmers. I recently discussed with one of them the fact that nowadays it’s rare to see the swallows flying around in our village. That the problem with these small birds, known as lucky charms on the farms, is directly related to the modern farming approach didn’t even dawn on to this man.
Within this context I may quote a clause which I once found in a book illustrating the history of ancient Luxembourgish farm houses.1 It’s been years ago that I read this book, but I never lost this sentence out of my memory:
Nous n’avons pas hérité les terres de nos ancêtres; nous les empruntons à nos enfants – Antoine de St. Exupéry
What Antoine de St. Exupéry, the French writer and air force pilot, who was born in 1900 and died in 1944 under mysterious circumstances at the end of WWII, said is “We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our children”. Today, when biogas is talked about, a lot of politicians often speak about a sustainable use of natural resources, about renewable energy and even increase of the farmer’s income. The bodies representing the farmers even see them as the energy suppliers of the future. The idea behind this scenery is surely laudable, the problem is what most of the farmers do with it. The name biogas, which pretends to be an ecological energy, is simply bogus claims.
The tragedy is not only that the farmers don’t get themselves off the clutches of the multinational companies but deeper into it, as most of the chemicals used in agriculture are by-products of the petrol industry. The main problem is also the irreversible loss of biodiversity. Luxembourg’s Ministry of Environment has recognized this fact and yet publishes advertisements on TV and radio programs as well as in newspapers for making the people sensitive to this problem. In one advertisement, Albert Einstein is quoted. Surely more known for its relativity theory, the most important and famous physician of the 20th century and Nobel laureate for physics, asked to speak about political questions also. Following the way Albert Einstein saw it, mankind could only survive a few years if all the bees would be wiped out, as without the pollination, no more grains can be produced, thus no life possible anymore.2 The fact that he lived from 1879 to 1955, a period when our draft animals still played an important role in agriculture and the short-lived nature of today wasn’t in the headlines yet, says a lot.
Biodiversity is the variety of all life and natural processes on earth, including diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems. Biodiversity provides food and medicine, fresh air and clean water, protection from natural disasters and green spaces for humans. Studies show that biodiversity is in grave danger from habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, climate change and overexploitation.3
Global ecosystem services are estimated at $16-$64 trillion. However, as noted by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, released in March 2005, human activities have taken the planet to the edge of a massive wave of species extinctions, further threatening our own well-being. For instance, the abundance of species has declined by 40% between 1970 and 2000. These findings are confirmed by the statistics from the IUCN Red List of over 15,500 threatened species, which show that 23% of mammals, 12% of birds and 31% of amphibians globally are threatened.3
Humankind is only a link in a fragile chain. Maintaining biodiversity is for me definitely a question of survival on this planet. Our future life depends on maintaining biodiversity as not only the susceptibility for natural disasters is reduced by an intact nature, but also the access to clean water, all kinds of food or raw materials is assured. The nitrate and pesticide pollution of the drinking water resources around our village is only one of the problems I can mention here within context.4
Through my beekeeping activity, I personally already experienced another way what the loss of biodiversity means. Since 2006 it is more and more a fight for survival for our bees. It’s not only that the Varroa mite keeps up the pressure, it’s also the total loss of their basic food. This problem occurs especially from mid-June to beginning of September, before the winter feeding starts. This year, due to very warm weather in April, the rape came into blossom the same time as the fruit trees and the dandelion. After only three weeks the fields, orchards and meadows returned to their uniform green and the bees were staring into empty plates.
As feeding with sugar is forbidden as long as the honey supers are standing above the broad chambers on the beehives, and the artificial nectar substitutes don’t let the same vitality develop as if the bees could follow their natural way of life, I see only one solution. Let us help nature return to what it was before chemicals and the armada of the shrilling and smelly farm implements hit our fields. Let us get the draft animals back to the fields and contribute our share for prevention so that the warning of Albert Einstein doesn’t come true.
First trials to close the gap in the nutrition of our bees were done last year on a small plot, left to us by one of our “farmer colleagues.” It was below the breakeven point for his big farm implements due to its small size. This year we expanded our efforts for maintaining biodiversity to two of our own fields, having a total area of one and a half hectares (~ 3 ¾ acres), which wereon lease to another farmer in the past. By the end of this year we plan to more than double this area by cultivating another two fields.
Don’t Feed the World?
Following the UNO convention about biodiversity, some nations, including the state of Luxembourg, have fixed the target to stop the loss of biodiversity till the year 2010. These are praiseworthy goals, but too often our politicians change their views. Today, as the problems due to worldwide financial crisis play an important role in everybody’s life, the maintaining of biodiversity not only gets more and more ignored, but it even gets considered as a brake shoe for economical development. For me this isn’t true, it’s exactly the opposite.
Therefore, we react on our farm and try to do something concrete. In my article published in the SFJ Fall 2007 issue I mentioned a program supported by Luxembourg’s Ministry of Environment called “Flouer an Gaart an der Bléi.” The goal was to reconvert the gardens and surroundings of the houses in the villages and cities, often described as green deserts, as well as the open fields, into a sea of blossom. Therefore, every household or farm could get special seeds for free, creating just a few weeks after the seeding a rich biotope for a multitude of insects and other wild living animals.
Last year we also made use of this possibility. This spring, as I wanted to order some new seeds, I was however informed that this program ended in 2008. “Out of the 2268 farmers, who were counted in Luxembourg for 2008, you could count the people participating in this program by one hand,” was the statement of a disappointed employee of the environmental organization “Hëllef fir d’Natur,” a nonprofit association founded in 1982, whose name can be translated into “help for nature.”
One favorite argument of the farmers against converting, even the smallest and non-productive piece of their land into a colorful biotope is that with this attitude we don’t feed the world. Well, since last April everybody has an answer to this statement. Under the title “Do we have a pollination problem in rape?” The Gabriel Lippmann Research Centre of Luxembourg published an article showing the relation between the pollination of the canola cultures and the bee population in Luxembourg in the years 2006 and 2007.5 It’s estimated that you need, besides the wind pollination, between two and six bee colonies per hectare of rape for assuring the best possible harvest. Taking into consideration the figures published by our national institute for statistics, Statec, it is perceptible that in 2006 six of the twelve cantons in Luxembourg showed an undersupplying of bees. In 2007 this number rose to eight cantons. This can be explained by theincreased of the rape fields of about 600 hectares (~ 1483 acres) and the loss of 100 bee colonies between 2006 and 2007. The average loss of yields per hectare was counted at 11.4 %.
For 2015 it is expected that the rape plantations will rise to 10,000 hectares (~ 24.711 acres). The number of beekeepers and bee colonies is dropping in Luxembourg about 2% per year. By that it gets obvious that the gap in the rape pollination will get bigger, year by year. The reason for the drop in beekeepers is that our small Luxembourg has only one fully professional beekeeper having some 250 bee colonies. The rest of the bees are kept as a leisure activity with an average of about 20 bee colonies per beekeeper. It gets more and more difficult to attract young people to this fascinating hobby. A lot of the older beekeepers have ceased their activity due to the raising problems in the bee colonies of the last years.
Variety Makes It
Our bees are often only brought in in relation to the honey, which they produce from the nectar. But in order to keep the colonies intact, they also need to collect the high-protein pollen on the flowers, their real energy for living of which each bee colony needs up to 35 kg (~ 77 lbs) per year. Therefore the seed which we chose in 2008 out of four different mixtures, was composed of five plants, which were 20% phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia), 20% buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum), 15% mustard (Sinapis alba), 25% summer vetch (Vicia sativa) and 20 % alexandrine clover (Trifolium alexandrinum). This mixture serves not only our honey bee, but also some wild living bees and other insects such as butterflies. Some species of the wild living insects have only a flying range of 100m (~ 10 yards) and the large monocultures mean their sure eradication in this area.
The seeding rate was set at about 20 kg/hectare (3.67 lbs/acre). 2008 was the testing year for the seed mixture itself. This year we analyzed the best type of primary tillage and seeding methods. Both fields were previous maize fields and in order to test the effects of minimum tillage seeding, none of them was plowed. Even if the preparation of the ground and the seeding is done at a time which fits perfectly into our time schedule, we tend to do the job as effective as possible. The field works for biodiversity can be done between the grassland preparation starting in March and ending in April and the haymaking, which doesn’t start before mid June. A second seeding period can be from mid-August till mid-September.
As the seeds are very sensitive to frost, the seeding can’t start before the end of April. The best thing of all with this work is that you aren’t in a hurry. If you can’t finish a job in one day you simply come back on the next occasion and finish it. Temporal intervals are even desired as this permits the plants to come into blossom over a longer period of time.
One of the tools for minimum seedbed preparation was our Groffdale twin gang disc harrow with a total of 16 discs offering 1.50m (~ 5’) working width. The soil in this area is very light. Therefore the 0.46m (~ 18’’) solid discs penetrated very well under the total implement weight of 308kg (~ 678 lbs), cut the maize residues and mixed them with the soil. Set into the most aggressive of the three available angles, this implement did a marvelous job and was an acceptable load for a team of draft horses. We tried this implement also yet on sod and heavier land, but the pulling power of both horses was considered here as inadequate for working over a longer time.
Another implement which was tested for primary tillage was a Pioneer spring tooth harrow. Its eleven teeth count a working width of 1.20m (~ 4’). Even if being a classic secondary tillage implement, the Pioneer harrow worked well in the stubble ground, a fact which we rely to the light soil conditions. The only disadvantage we could notice was its tendency to drag the plant residues along. For farmers using 3-point-hitches this isn’t a big problem as lifting the implement at the headlands for short turnings also cleans it. Horse drawn harrows, however, need to be cleaned by hand, a negative aspect, which we have also discovered on grassland with our Einböck weed harrows, originally built for tractors.
The spring tooth harrow, however, performed better in leveling the ground than the disc harrow and created a more uniform seedbed. In order to avoid an early wear and tear due to the abrasive sandy soil, the Pioneer general purpose tooth where fitted with reversible points of 4.3 cm (~ 5/32’’) width.
The seeding itself was done with our homemade broadcast seeder based on an I&J cultivator frame. This implement, shown in the SFJ Fall 2007 issue, had no problems in applying the seed mixture as the agitator shaft in the seed box was shut off. The agitator would separate the different corns when rotating through the seed by dropping the bigger corns first to the bottom of the seed box, resulting in an uneven seed pattern around the field.
On the first day I was disappointed with the bad ground contact of the five rubber rollers on the seeder. On the way home with the horses I thought about this problem and realized that I failed to release the pins fixing the rollers during transport. What a disgrace! Do I really need to write an instruction manual for myself for the implements I built?
On the next day the turns around the field were made with full swiveling rollers and a perfect ground contact, assuring also that the outer left roller better managed to get the chain drive working properly. On arable ground I expected a heavier load for the horses as the 4.00-12 tires are a little bit too small for running under the total implement weight of 754 kg (~ 1661 lbs) through the fine structure of the seedbed. On short grassland there is less rolling resistance than on arable land. Our two Ardennes however managed to work one hectare (~ 2.5 acres) of land with ease and a shorter time.
For comparing rolling the broadcasted seed on the ground versus covering it with soil, a third of the seeded area was worked with a Pioneer spike tooth harrow. The reason for doing this is that phacelia for example is a dark germinator and needs to be slightly covered. The 1.80 m (~ 6’) wide harrow was used on a light setting. However, due to the dryness which occurred after the unusual high temperatures in April this year, the sandy soil on the test field offered a low resistance and the 40 teeth ran too deep. Because of that, the seed was covered more than desired and the germination disturbed.
The Pioneer and Groffdale implements are shining examples of modern horse drawn machinery. Patterned following ancient farm tools, they offer low weight and draft requirements coupled with outstanding performances. The Groffdale disc is fitted with wheels which can be raised by a crank and make the transport to and off the fields a pleasure. The implement isn’t lifted at the headlands as the rear gang can turn around the front gang, thus making short turns possible without stirring up the soil. For road transport the rear gang is fixed in central position. For getting the spring and spike tooth harrows to the field we use our multi functional trailer, which appear several times in previous SFJ issues. The spike tooth harrow can be loaded by hand on the wooden platform, as it weighs only 52 kg (~ 115 lbs). For loading the 98 kg (~ 216 lbs) heavy spring tooth harrow, the hand winch, which normally serves to winch the manure containers or round bales of hay on the chassis, has been mounted higher on the frame. With two wooden beams at the rear, it’s possible to winch the harrow easily on the platform as it glides on its front shoes and rear raker bars.
Win-Win Situation
For the next year we plan to try other seed mixtures with up to 24 different species. Therefore, we got in touch with two German organic seed producers. Following the advice we got from the experts of the organization “Hëllef fir d’Natur,” the land will be divided into rows of about six to twelve meters large (~ 20 to 40’), which will allow us to combine the biodiversity plots as rotating fallow land with other cultures for our own consumption like legumes and potatoes or alfalfa for making high nutritive animal fodder. The overwintering sections of biodiversity plants will serve as a retreat area for a lot of wildlife. Furthermore, every field, if it hasn’t yet one, will get a hedge on one side, which will allow raising the total hedge length on our farm up to 1.5 km (~ 1 mile).
Even if the above mentioned program is no longer continued, I see our project as a win-win situation. Winning for the nature, but also for our purse, as our efforts are financially supported by different Ministries in Luxembourg. Besides the so called “premium for maintaining the landscape,” a financial bonus every farmer with more than three hectares gets in Luxembourg from the Ministry of Agriculture, we also get some money for leaving the land fallow, as half of the fields are located within a water reserve, as well as for cultivating the hedges.
Through the help of the “Hëllef fir d’Natur” association, we will also sign so called biodiversity contracts for these fields with the Ministry of Environment. This procedure is on its way through the bureaucracy and we expect to get it ready for 2010. The Ministry of Environment also financially supports works for nature conservation, which are done with draft animals. In the past these subsidies were only paid for horse logging.
The four fields which we chose for the biodiversity project are all located about 2 km (~ 1 ¼ miles) away from our farm. The disadvantage is that it takess some time to get there with the horses and the implements. The positive aspect is that the horses are warmed up a little bit before starting to work. However time isn’t endless at our farm, which is run besides our main jobs. After the positive experiences with minimum till seeding, my next project in modern horse drawn implements will be an “all-in-one” tool, which allows us to prepare the seedbed in non tilled ground, as well as place and roll on or cover the seed in just one operation. We hope to get this implement ready for September 2009, just early enough for the second seeding in the biodiversity plots.
You may have noticed that the harness shown in the pictures of this article don’t feature all the details I praised in the previous “Progressing with horses” article. This is due to the fact that the pictures were made in a “transition period,” where we waited to get all the harness parts from Sweden and Canada. All the customized parts have arrived in the meantime and the harness improving project will continue. The new machine will also feature a unique hitch gear, which eliminates, even in a multiple hitch, every vertical or lateral pressure on the collars, thus the horse’s necks.
The arable land represents only a third of Luxembourg’s agricultural surface. The rest is grassland, where efforts can be done in order to maintain biodiversity. This will be the focus of the second part of this series consisting of four articles.
Not Alone In This World
In my previous articles I mentioned my contacts to the horse farming people in Italy. Since my first visit in February 2008, I returned two other times to “Bella Italia.” Every time when my train arrives in the “Porta Nuova” railway station and I have a first look on the picturesque city of Verona, I regret two things.
The first is that I never had the pleasure to hear, in the arena of Verona, the unforgettable and unrivalled voice of Luciano Pavarotti, my favorite Italian tenor, who died in 2007. This impressive amphitheater, built in Romanian time for gladiator’s fights, serves today regularly as scenery for operas, where up to 22.000 people can find a seating place on the big marble stones. Near to the arena, you can smell, taste and see what the Italian way of life means when walking along the fruit and vegetable market “Piazza delle Erbe.” The difference between our stressful daily routine in Central Europe and the Italian “dolce vita” is perceptible here at every turn.
The second is that I hadn’t the chance to meet the Italian horse farmers from earlier in my life. There is definitely a spiritual kinship between Albano Moscardo and myself. Albano works in the mornings in his one-man-company “Emme Studio” as technical drawer and illustrator for manuals and parts lists, mainly for farm machinery manufacturers in Germany and Italy. The three-dimensional illustrations are done by computer or made by hand applying an even air brush. In the afternoons he works at their 10 hectares (~ 25 acres) farm, where his wife Loretta assists him in raising fruits, vegetables, cereals, and hay. The vegetables and hay are mainly for family needs and only the surplus is sold. The hay is harvested around the fruit trees in the orchards where peaches, plums, cherries, apples, pears and apricots are cultivated. These products are delivered to a shop for organic food in Verona and also sold at the farm itself. The Moscardos like the contact with their customers and prefer the direct sale. During the winter Albano finds also the time to capture some sceneries of his daily farm life in oil paintings.
The three draft horses at the Moscardos farm are TPR (Cavallo Agricola Italiano da Tiro Pesante Rapido), the only Italian draught horse breed. Not only by their colors and their modest height, these animals have a lot of resemblance with our own Ardennes. Also, the breeding in Italy is done mainly for the slaughterhouse and besides this the national breeding association seems to have only an eye for the coach drivers. A so called draft horse, which can successfully compete in a coach driving contest, differs, however, only by its temperament from a horse suitable for working in agriculture, forestry or viticulture.
Recently Albano has also created another new company called “Equi Idea,” whose activity is to develop, manufacture and market modern animal traction equipment. All the parts for new implements are designed on Albano’s computers, which makes it possible to visualize various options and configurations before the production starts. Furthermore, it allows sending the drawings directly to a company specialized in steel laser cutting and getting complicated parts with an unbeatable precision. By that the quality and finish of the Equi Idea implements are simply unbeatable. The well illustrated Equi Idea leaflets, complete manuals and parts lists are not only published in Italian, but also in English, German and French.
Besides all these activities Albano is also speaker of “Noi e il Cavallo,” a study group founded by people who want to go further into the subject of animal traction. Two times per year a newsletter is published, which stores their own experiences and those coming from various regions of the world. Their first experiences with animal traction reach back to 1990, when some organic and biodynamic farmers gathered in order to discuss the possibilities of using draft horses at their farms as workmates. Just not using pesticides and chemical fertilizers wasn’t considered enough, something else was missing at their farms.
However, very soon everybody realized two major problems. The animal traction culture had almost totally disappeared from Italy and no one knew how to train a draught animal. Furthermore, only a few old implements, recovered from past generations, were at their disposal and there seemed to be no way to the future. A delegation visited the USA in May and November 1992 and shipped a container full of harnesses from an Amish shop, new and used Millcreek manure spreaders, new White Horse two way plows, a Teamster 2000 forecart and some other used sulky plows and smaller tillage implements to Italy. Ten years after this visit, the Italians returned another time to USA and visited the Horse Progress Days 2002 in Indiana.
In 1991 Albano and his friends also met Europe’s pioneer in animal traction Charlie Pinney. Very soon the first Italian prototypes of basic and ground drive pto forecarts rolled out of Albano’s workshop. They also built some ground driven manure spreaders and, only with some illustrations in hand mainly found in Lynn Miller’s books, even a hay-loader. Today the range of machinery extends to complex implements like a motorized forecart having a full hydraulic pto drive and a ground driven round bale loader.
During my last visit to Verona in early June 2009, Albano and I spent anew a long day with our favorite occupation: testing and discussing new implements. The test field in the Moscardo’s garden showed a plot with mustard and phacelia. It’s not just a lucky chance that Albano and his friends are doing the same research about “Maintaining Biodiversity with Horses” than some 900 km (~ 375 miles) further north in Luxembourg. All the horse farming people who I had the pleasure to meet in Italy live very close to nature. In one of the next articles another Italian horse farming family, Nicoletta and Pio Lago, will be presented.
The first test implement out of Equi Idea’s product range was a so-called knife roller. Working following the same principle as the cover crop roller recently launched by I&J, Albano, however, fixed instead of the flat steel bars in chevron style, sharp knives, originally used in feed mixing carts, on a steel drum. This outfit worked extremely well and beat down the biomass and cut it into short pieces leaving a mulch on the ground, which allows plowing the green manure under easily. The request for such an implement came from some organic winegrowers, who plan to raise green manure strips between the vines. Not just in France, but also in Italy, the two major European wine producing countries, the use of draft animals and mules in the vineyards has gotten popular in the recent years. As the transport of the roller back to the implement shed over a stony path caused some damage to the sharp blades, Albano plans to adapt a hydraulic hand-operated lifting mechanism to the frame of the roller. Another outfit with more knives with a varied pattern will also be tested in the near future. The working width of the roller is 1.15 m (~ 3 ¾’) and the weight about 136 kg (~ 300 lbs), which can be raised by filling the drum with water.
The knife roller was hitched to a new forecart named Minialko, as it makes use of a rubber spring axle from the German manufacturer Al-Ko, who is one of the major European suppliers of axle components for car trailers. Even if the 160 kg (~ 352 lbs) of the small forecart, which can be ordered with shafts for a single or a tongue for a team hitch, isn’t enough to get the spring working properly, Albano prefers this axle due to its low price as it is mass produced and the easy possibility of using the factory installed mechanical braking mechanism.
Another implement which came into use, was the Mipe Viviani disc harrow. This company settled in beautiful Toscana ad has produced farm implements since 1840. Today, besides olive harvesting tools, a vast range of tillage machinery is built. Some, due to their great working depth, need big chain tractors to be towed. Back in the nineties this company manufactured a disc harrow and a walking two way plow for animal traction. Just five of the disc harrows were sold and up to fifteen plows. Even if Albano has contacted this manufacturer in order to launch this production again, Mipe Viviani shows no interest any more in these products.
That this company wasn’t a horse drawn implement manufacturer becomes clear when inspecting the details of their machinery. The disc harrow is, for example, equipped with a one wheel tongue truck. A good idea, but as the heavy steel wheel can’t swivel, short turnings ask quite some pulling power of the horses. For tractor implements these details aren’t of such importance. The tongue less disc harrow is a single action unit with twelve discs resulting in a working width of 2.00 m (~ 6 ½’). The 0.42 m (~ 16 ½’’) big discs can be set by two angling levers. Even if the frame allows mounting a center spring tooth, Albano is not quite satisfied with the working results of this implement. Therefore he plans to cut it into pieces for forming a tandem disc harrow by putting 6 discs as a trailing unit behind the main frame.
The fourth tool to be tested was the new Multi from Equi Idea. Basically, this multipurpose implement is a small single horse two way plow of 24cm (~ 9 1/2″) working width and has a lot of similarities with the plow formerly produced by Mipe Viviani. Albano’s addition is that it can also be transformed into a potato digger or a five shank cultivator. In just a few moments one tool can be replaced by another, this without using wrenches, as it’s fitted with a well engineered adapter. The point of draft can be changed horizontally and the plow shares tipped over only by activating handles similar as on a bicycle. By its low weight of just 65 kg (~ 143 lbs) this implement is suitable for working in small fields, gardens or vineyards.
Bibliography:
(1) Einleitung
D’Lëtzebuerger Bauerenhaus
Editions Phi/Kremer-Mu?ller & Cie
(2) Jahresbericht 2008
Fondation „Hëllef fir d’Natur”
Regulus /2009
(3) Biodiv – Countdown 2010
IUCN – The International Union for Conservation of Nature
(4) Jahresbericht des Projektes SES
Wasserschutzberatung der LWK
03.03.09
(5) Haben wir ein Bestäubungsproblem im Raps?
Michael Eickermann in Lëtzebuerger Bauer #14
03.04.09
