Article 7 Monitoring

The competent authority shall ensure that maps showing the percentage of cattle farms, percentage of livestock and percentage of agricultural land covered by individual derogations for each municipality are drawn up and updated every year.

In order to ascertain that the derogation will not jeopardise the objective of Directive 91/676/EEC, monitoring shall be done in root zone water, surface waters and groundwater, in order to provide data on nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil profile and nitrates concentrations in surface and groundwater, both under derogation and non-derogation conditions. Monitoring shall be carried out at farm field scale in the agricultural catchment national monitoring programme. The monitoring sites shall include main soil types, fertilisation practices and crops.

Surveys and continuous nutrient analysis shall be carried out in the agricultural catchment national monitoring programme and shall provide data on local land use, crop rotations and agricultural practices on cattle farms benefiting from an individual derogation. Collected information and data from nutrient analysis as referred to in Article 5 of this Decision and monitoring as referred to in Article 7(2) of this Decision shall be used for model-based calculations of the magnitude of nitrogen and phosphorus losses from cattle farms benefiting from an individual derogation based on scientific principles.

The competent authorities shall quantify the percentage of land under derogation covered by clover or alfalfa in grassland and by barley/pea undersown with grass.