Harvest on Nature Areas

For the past 40-50 years, meadows have lost their importance to farmers both economically and operationally. Asaconsequence,manyofthemeadowsare withoutoperation today.

They overgrow in tall herbs and will eventually turn into scrub or forest if no management effort is made. Lack of operation has repercussions for the animals and plants living on the open meadows.

By harvesting the areas, all plant material above cutting height is removed from the area at once. It provides the small plants with light and thus better growth conditions.

A proportion of our meadows have an unnatural high content of nutrients. The amount of nutrients removed by harvesting is higher than that removed by grazing. Harvesting can thus be a good method for removing nutrients from natural areas.

Meadow soils are often wet, and working with machines can be difficult. Thus, new special machines are being developed which can harvest and collect the plant material from the meadows where ordinary agricultural machines are not suitable.

Biogas

The project uses the harvested plant material for energy purposes - biogas. As this is relatively new, experiments are made in collaboration with the biogas plants.

The plant material to be included in the production of biogas must have a relatively high content of dry matter. The harvest will consequently take place from July to the end of September.