International competition, “Baltic Sea Farmer of the Year Award”

Every year, together with the bank Swedbank, the World Wildlife Fund announces the international competition, “Baltic Sea Farmer of the Year Award.” The competition aims at encouraging farmers to reduce the runoff of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) into the environment and thus add to the reduction of eutrophication in the Baltic Sea (i.e. that of “the blooms of water,” or “algal blooms”).

The Baltic Sea Farmer of the Year Award was launched in 2008. In Lithuania, the Lithuania Fund for Nature assists the World Wildlife Fun in organizing this competition. The organizers invite farmers, farms or their organizations to submit applications and compete for the national award and the title of the winner.

Firstly, Lithuania and other nine Baltic Sea coastal countries select the winners of their national competitions. Then, in the autumn, the winners are all invited to the international conference in a Baltic Sea coastal country where the regional winner of the Baltic Sea Farmer of the Year is announced. Each national competition winner receives a prize sum of 1,000 Euros and the reimbursement of his or her conference-related travel expenses, while the regional winner is awarded a prize sum of 10,000 Euros. The mass media partner, the Lithuanian newspaper “Valstiečių laikraštis,” awards the Lithuanian competition winner a one-year subscription of its newspaper.

Even though competition organizers pay most attention to the efforts of farmers to reduce the runoff of nutrients, especially when innovative approaches are being applied, they also evaluate other approaches used in reducing the negative impact of farming on the environment. Those can be measures taken to protect and increase biological diversity and reduce the use of pesticides, measures taken to reduce the use of energy and fuel, and other environmentally friendly methods.

Specialized, mixed, ecological, and traditional agricultural farms, as well as small-size family farms and farm companies can participate in the competition.

Competition organizers:

Mass media partners:

Participation criteria:

Economic criteria:

a. Agricultural activity should be a farmer’s main profit-making activity.
b. A farmer can be engaged in horticulture, animal husbandry, and mixed agricultural activity.
c. Both ecological and traditional agricultural farms can participate in the competition.

Criteria for environmental protection:

a. A farmer has to use approaches that reduce the runoff of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) from his or her farm into water bodies and the evaporation of ammonia from manure holding pits.
b. Approaches that are applied to reduce nutrient runoff into the environment have to be innovative or unique in some way. Farmers have to demonstrate in a clear way that those approaches help in combating the eutrophication, or the “blooms,” of water bodies. Among many other, there can be such examples as:
i. Those can be measures created, tested, and applied by a farmer. The farmer has to demonstrate the effectiveness of his or her measures.
ii. Those can be well-known, traditional measures that are, however, applied on a large scale and a large area.
iii. Those can be innovative, trial measures the effect of which is yet difficult to determine but which hold potential for the future.
iv. Those can be measures different from all the above described measures but still useful in an educational way as they encourage other farms to apply environmentally friendly measures.

Other criteria are thus:

a. Those are environment-friendly measures applied on other farms (for example, the measures that help in conserving biological diversity and greatly reducing the use of pesticides and amounts of energy or fossil-fuel combustion). Although these are not the major criteria, they will also be factored as additional points into the selection of the winner.

b. A farm has to fulfill the minimal requirements for environmental protection, animal husbandry, etc.
c. Both individual farmers and family farms or farm companies can be nominated for the award.
d. Participants have to be ready to show around their farm and demonstrate their farming methods to an evaluation committee.