Agriculture overview of first half of trip

I have visited several farms and two agricultural organizations - one similar to the farm bureau and one similar to the USDA - while in Germany. While agriculture is quite different here, they face similar issues to American farmers. Almost all of these visits were in western Germany.

The soil is very sandy so they are forced to irrigate when it doesn't rain. Some of their crops include potatoes, sugar beets, wheat, barley, maize, asparagus, rapeseed, onion, and triticalie (cross of rye and wheat...it is used for hog feed). Their field sizes are much smaller and often quite spread out. Farm houses are actually in little villages, not out in the country. There are a lot of dairy cows, some hog operations, and of course sheep! I visited several dairies and one hog operation with 1,000 pigs. It was a fairly new building and quite impressive. They were showing me all the things they had to include because of government regulations. They commented that the people setting the regulations had never even been on a hog farm....sounded familiar. Hog confinements are the one building that sits out in the country. All the other farm houses and barns are in villages - pretty odd to see. Here is the control panel for the whole confinement building:

Germany is an extremely environmentally-friendly country. Farmers in Germany are very conscience of reusing and repurposing whatever they can. They are very proud of their biogas plants which can be fed by a variety of things but maize is most common. They can sell back energy (20 year contract) and use heat from the plants to heat buildings and dry crops. There is a bit of controversy because more and more maize is being grown to feed them and many think it's too much. The rate they are going up is slowing down because the government subsidies are ending. The medium size plants cost 1 million euro to build and it takes approximately 15 years to break even. It is a technical system and each farmer seems to be very well educated on it. Here is a photo of one of the many computer screens they use to monitor it:

Wind turbines dot the landscape here also. Twenty percent of their energy is produced by renewable resources but they would like to be closer to 40%.

I stayed with one host family who are organic farmers (crops and cattle). He told me there was not much of a market for it because Germans don't want to pay for it. He earns less per acre but says he does it for the good of the land.

In meeting with two separate organizations, I discovered German farmers and American farmers battle many similar issues. They are also trying to find ways to tell their story to consumers. But like the U.S., the general impression of farmers by consumers is quite positive. Land prices are even higher here. In Lower Saxony, only one child can inherit the farm. This helps prevent farms from being split up by heirs into even smaller farms or being sold off.

You can't have agriculture without tractor pulls and I was able to go to a local pull! It was smaller than American pulls but the crowds were just as enthusiastic! By the way, all beverages at the pull were in glass cups and mugs - no paper products.

We are half way through the tour and I have several more exciting ag-related stops ahead!


-Debby