On May 29-30, meetings of farmers creating two Polish Hubs were organized at the dairy in Ostrołęka. The aim of the meetings was to familiarize farmers with the possibilities of obtaining production subsidies under CAP and to discuss the results of surveys conducted on farms and subsequent activities within the framework of the OCNET project. The speech on “Principles of running farms in the organic farming system, funding opportunities under CAP 2023-2027”  was delivered by Katarzyna Golan, senior advisor at the Agricultural Extension Centre in Ostrołęka. Then Tomasz Sakowski, who is the national coordinator of the project, gave two presentations, the first on the topic: Carbon footprint analysis, Carbon balancing tools and the second on ecological climate agriculture. Finally, the HUB coordinator Bożena Holak discussed the preliminary results of surveys conducted at the beginning of this year characterizing individual farms participating in the OCNET project. The presented papers were the basis for a later discussion with the Hub members.

Farmers were interested in the possibility of obtaining subsidies for implementing eco-schemes. They also discussed the possibility of participating in cross-country visits to farms of farmers from other countries participating in the project. In matters of environmental protection and the hydrological drought that has been going on for years, farmers pointed out that the drought significantly reduces the quality of the produced animal feed and caused the associated lower milk yield of cows.

In several cases, it turned out that further enlargement of the barns was not possible due to the location of the farm in the middle of the village and the lack of possibility of establishing a new one in a more favourable location. The age of milk producers and the lack of successors to run animal production, despite high milk purchase prices (€0.72/kg), are the main reasons for the decreasing number of organic milk producers.