A green wave washes over Bornholm

A pig farmer, a butterfly enthusiast and an organic furniture designer. All three of them participate in green initiatives that will give Bornholm and the Højlyngsstien more wild nature and diversity.

A man in a bright orange hot dog jacket is driving a white van on the road between Aakirkeby and Nexø. Suddenly he jerks the steering wheel, the car skids over the edge of the road and continues bumping into the green pea field.

I ask, slightly shocked, if you can do that on Bornholm?

“You can. If you own the field yourself,” says pig farmer Rasmus Brunke, opening the car door.

Klippeøen has long marketed itself with the Højlyngsstien Trail, where you hike along the ridge of cliffs 67 kilometers from Hammeren in the west to Årsdale in the east.

The path will now become the backbone of Bornholm’s Green Wave, an initiative that will benefit both nature and tourism. Where farmers, the regional municipality and the Danish Nature Conservation Association will expand the green belt of nature, so that more hectares will be ready for butterflies, plants, forest, meadows and clean springs.

In time, the wave will swing south and Dueodde, so that the natural areas will be connected across the island. Here, Øle Å, which runs through Rasmus Brunke’s areas, will become a central animal and plant highway.

Rasmus Brunke, who pulled the steering wheel so hard a moment ago, has already started to put some of his worst lands out of operation at Skovgården, which has been in the family’s ownership for over 100 years and produces 12,000 piglets each year.

It’s their food that we stand for.

“This year I have taken out 5-6 smaller pieces of land, which I don’t get much use out of anyway, and have sown pollinator fallow (a seed mixture for fallow fields of plants with a lot of nectar and pollen, which are good for bees, ed.). It could be that the soil is too moist, is too close to Øle Å or is difficult to harvest. I am betting that all the land along the river will be taken out by next year.”

Right now, there is not a single penny for Rasmus Brunke’s bid for the green tripartite, for which he sits on the board. Because even though Bornholm, relative to its area, has one of the largest nitrogen emissions in the country, the state has not offered the rocky island any money as compensation for reducing nitrogen emissions.

“It’s to show my good will. We want to be allowed to cultivate the best soil optimally, so that we get the most yield possible. Then we apply fertilizer where the soil can carry it and absorb nitrogen, and then we take out soil where the yield is not as great, and where nitrogen would typically be leached because the plants cannot use it.”

The rare caterpillar

On a raised boardwalk through Ekkodalen near Almindingen sits Michael Stoltze, a tall, wiry, gray-haired man. But as he bends over his backpack to find his SLR camera, he looks like a 9-year-old boy who has just caught his first butterfly.

“The big thing here on Bornholm now is that we are waiting to see swallowtails. We know that the beautiful butterflies came to the island in quite large numbers last year, and for the first time in 100 years, a lot of larvae were found. They are pupae now, but we have not seen the butterflies yet. The swallowtail’s immigration is partly a result of climate change, and partly a result of less spraying than before in private gardens and in the forests.”

Michael Stoltze is a professional biologist, author and the Danish Society for Nature Conservation’s representative on Bornholm in the local green tripartite. He still hasn’t grown out of his excitement over a caterpillar, an area of yellow meadow grass or a jay walking on a Galloway cow that is lying down and chewing its cud.

“We call it the green wave. Wild nature from north to south. An alliance between us who want to protect nature, those who live off nature, and the tourism industry. We were already well underway when the green tripartite came, and now we are all ready when the green wave will go from Hammeren to Dueodde,” says the nature educator.

Ekkodalen is an example of a balance. Here, the Galloway cattle keep the vegetation down, so there is no need to use machinery or poison. The cliff face is completely protected nature, and on top of the wall grows an old oak forest that takes care of itself and provides space for insects, including butterflies, and wildlife in general.

“That’s the essence of nature conservation. A hotspot where it’s teeming with life that we can look at without disturbing anything or anyone.”

The only drawback, or should we say meadowsweet, is that there is still no guarantee that a sufficient portion of the 53 billion kroner that the state and foundations have allocated nationally to realize the green tripartite will come to Bornholm. But Michael Stoltze is optimistic.

The Ecologist’s Pile of Soil

Tyge Axel Holm, who has a small homestead near Rø Plantage southwest of Gudhjem, has dug a huge hole, so that there is now a huge pile of soil next to his microscopic farm, where he grows onions, carrots, gourmet potatoes, garlic and asparagus and experiments with new grain varieties. Every year he rotates the varieties so as not to exhaust the soil and transmit diseases.

The hole will be used for Sia, the old Icelandic horse, when she puts on the horseshoes. Right now she is grazing unsuspectingly in the sunshine in front of the apple orchard, where the chickens are swarming around.

“The best thing about Bornholm is the cliffs. Where there are cliffs, it has not been possible to cultivate the land. That is why nature has been allowed to be in peace, otherwise there would have been industrial agriculture everywhere.”

This is what Tyge Axel Holm, a furniture designer and wood artist with an impressive CV, says. He wants to combine his aesthetic craftsmanship with respect for nature and what we need to live on.

Here he has his own sawmill without a tarpaulin, so he can cut wood for his furniture and household items. He uses surplus wood for heating, while shavings and sawdust are used as mulch to create new layers of soil.

“Was it worth it? No, what can’t be done with a machine is rarely worth it.”

His own farm and several nearby ones have been designated as specially protected nature and are part of the green wave that the local tripartite committee wants to expand. And it also makes a lot of sense for Tyge Axel Holm, who can see that his time as an organic farmer is running out, as 95 percent of the food sold on the island is imported here.

“I am 72 years old. It is impossible to find a successor to my design business and the idea of running a circular business. And already a third of my land is protected because of rare species. I can see that many of my neighbors with small plots of land could be interested in giving up the operation if they could get compensation. It could be the veterinarian, the free parish priest, a closed mink farm.”

What small farmers like Tyge Axel Holm are waiting for is for some conditions to be put on the table for the transfer of the land. Right now it is easy enough for the country’s tripartite committee to fantasize, he believes, but before anything really happens, Sia will probably have long since been put in the hole and the ground will have been patted down.

In return, the rare swallowtail caterpillar has found its home in Tyge’s bed of carrots. You came from the ground.

FAKTA

Quiz (or cheeky trivia) for use at the public meeting

How long is the Højlyngsstien? You know, of course, that it is 67 km on the rocky ridge across the island from Hammeren to Årsdale.

What is high heather? It’s the same as a heath, only it’s higher above sea level.

How much of Bornholm is actually granite rock? Approximately 2/3 of the island is rock, most of it north of a line from Hasle to Nexø.

Which large forest do you hike through on the Højlyngsstien? It’s Almindingen, of course. You can spice it up by saying that it’s Denmark’s 5th largest forest.

Source: Biologist Michael Stoltze, Bornholm’s representative in the Danish Nature Conservation Association