AFSAL General Meeting: results of the Hamster MAE*

On Monday, 20 June, the AFSAL Association (Farmers and Wild Animals in Alsace), an association of farmers who collectively put in place environmentally friendly measures to protect hamsters, met for its general meeting.

On the stand (from left to right), Mr André Jacob, the Chamber of Agriculture Director, Mr Jean-Philippe d’Issernio (the Bas-Rhin Territorial Director), Mr Laurent Darley (the Assistant Regional Director for the Regional Department of the Environment, Urban Planning and Housing), and Mr Laurent Fisher, the AFSAL President.

Accompanied by members of the State government, the sixty participants talked about results of actions the association had carried out. They also spoke about results of the ONCFS’s hamster population monitoring action, the planned release of hamsters bred in animal husbandry, the impact of the future ring road around Western Strasbourg, and the State Council’s recent cancellation of 2012 ministerial by-laws protecting hamsters. Back from an educational trip in Switzerland organized in the framework of the LIFE ALISTER Project, three farmers, all CUMA members, spoke about several innovative agricultural practices they found particularly interesting: direct sowing of soybeans in a vegetation cover of rye that had been rolled, sowing beets after minimal strip-till soil cultivation, rapeseed that was sowed with clover, the comparison of ploughed and non-ploughed soil structures, as well as the amounts of financial incentives the federal State and Swiss cantons grant to farmers to promote these new techniques.

*MAE: An agri-environmental measure