For effective agricultural nature management, more is needed than just concluding management agreements with farmers. First, the agricultural land must be properly arranged and may need to be devalued. Sometimes it is necessary for entire agricultural businesses to switch to more extensive operations. Subsequently, it is important that agricultural nature management is sufficiently concentrated. This requires area-specific coordination, often with active land policies through buying and exchanging land. Finally, the management contracts must be strong enough to achieve the necessary extensification of land use and/or to develop habitats for endangered species and nature.

Better and long-term rewards are needed, but not easy 

Agricultural nature management has a significant impact on agricultural operations. This is especially true if the management is concentrated with heavy, extensive task packages. The governments ability to sufficiently reward farmers for agricultural nature management is limited by EU state aid rules. However, heavy management agreements that are spatially concentrated do have a significant impact on operations. This makes better and long-term rewards an important condition for participation. Concrete bottlenecks include (1) that current management fees have not been increased for years and (2) that long-term contracts are possible but currently not concluded due to unclear financing arrangements between the national government and provinces.