WWF Baltic Sea Farmer of the Year Award is annual competition to inspire farmers in the entire Baltic Sea region to take an active part in combating eutrophication. It was launched by WWF and ELF, together with Swedbank, and in cooperation with the Baltic Farmers Forum for the Environment, and farmers' organisations from around the Baltic Sea.

The Baltic Sea is still one of the most threatened seas in the world. Eutrophication or over-fertilization has been identified as the single most important threat to its health and agricultural runoff is the main cause.

A major solution to this problem is to promote more sustainable farming and land management practices, it should be at the heart of the future Common Agriculture Policy. The purpose of the Baltic Sea Farmer of the Year Award is to highlight best practices in "Baltic-friendly" farming and to recognise and promote farmers who are leading in innovative measures to reduce runoff from their farms.

Estonia was represented in the final round by Toomas Jaadla, who won the national award for avoiding soil erosion on abandoned peat fields by establishing cranberry and blueberry plantations.

Jaadla is the first farmer in Europe to develop and successfully employ such a solution.

The Estonian Fund for Nature (ELF) and the Farmers Central Union are the participating organizations for Estonia. The prize is 10,000 euros and the award for the national winner is 1,000 euros.

ESTONIA Toomas Jaadla

Estonia has vast areas of deserted peat fields that are constantly leaching nutrients to the sea. But these peat fields can be cultivated and the leaching reduced. The Estonian winner, Toomas Jaadla, shows how this can be done.

On Marjasoo farm, Toomas Jaadla looks out over his fields of blueberry and cranberry bushes. The berries give his family their income. Below ground the bushes do their share to help the environment of the Baltic Sea. The roots and rhizomes fixate the peat on which they are cultivated. On other abandoned peat fields, where nothing is cultivated, the peat erodes into waterbodies at a rate of about 1000 m3/ha every year. These thousands of hectares of peat fields, abandoned since the Soviet era, have been and still are an unsolved ecological problem.

A big advantage of cultivating on peat is that the peat provides the bushes with all the nutrients they need. No extra fertilizer is required.

"I hope that I can inspire more people to do this kind of farming," says Toomas Jaadla.

Being the first in Europe to cultivate lowbush blueberry on abandoned peat fields, he has already become a source of inspiration to others. Similar farms have been established in Estonia and Latvia. Toomas Jaadla's farm operates as a training centre for Räpina Gardening College and the Estonian University of Life Sciences has run field experiments on the farm for ten years.

Toomas started cultivating cranberries in 1988. He got the idea when he heard about Estonian peat being sold to greenhouses in the Netherlands. "I started thinking about how the peat could be used here in Estonia instead," says Toomas Jaadla.

As a young student he had worked on peat fields during school holidays, but he had no previous experience of farming. Being a building engineer, his training has been helpful. "I know a lot of chemistry," says Toomas. But he had to learn many things about farming from scratch. "I grew up in the countryside and when I was young I spent a lot of time picking berries and fishing. I think that's why I like this job. I get to do interesting work in the countryside," says Toomas Jaadla.