Oné prob­lem of nature con­ser­va­tion is the com­pe­ti­tion for land between it and agri­cul­ture. Both aim at the same area. For this rea­son, the acqui­si­tion of land for nature con­ser­va­tion pur­pos­es was the most impor­tant aspect of the large-scale nature con­ser­va­tion project of nation­al sig­nif­i­cance. The association’s own areas, which are usu­al­ly leased again to the pre­vi­ous ten­ants after the expiry of exist­ing leas­es, may only be man­aged under nature con­ser­va­tion require­ments. These con­cern, for exam­ple, the ear­li­est usage dates and the den­si­ty of live­stock. The areas des­ig­nat­ed or planned as wilder­ness areas by the state of Bran­den­burg are to be grad­u­al­ly with­drawn from use.
Since the year 2000, the state of Bran­den­burg has been try­ing to dis­trib­ute the asso­ci­at­ed restric­tions on use even­ly among the farms with the help of a com­pa­ny land con­sol­i­da­tion procedure.
The dis­putes between agri­cul­ture and nature con­ser­va­tion, some of which were staged in the media and which were some­times brought into the region from out­side, have large­ly been a thing of the past since the fund­ing expired in 2000 and the asso­ci­at­ed dwin­dling oppor­tu­ni­ties for the state of Bran­den­burg to influ­ence leas­ing. The rela­tion­ship between the asso­ci­a­tion as the largest prop­er­ty own­er and its agri­cul­tur­al ten­ants has relaxed and nor­mal­ized. It has been shown that it is quite pos­si­ble to grad­u­al­ly imple­ment the nature con­ser­va­tion require­ments of the grant notice with­out plac­ing an undue bur­den on local agri­cul­ture. In any case, for rea­sons of nature con­ser­va­tion, no farm in the region has had to close. It should stay that way in the future.