Deutschland over all

I disappeared from the farm for a few days to visit friends in Frankfurt. I had had enough of hedge clearing and chainsawing and decided to return to the land of my fathers to swap agricultural for cultural pursuits. 

My friends have moved from London to a small village, really an outer suburb of Frankfurt, and have made quite a stir. To begin with they don't own a car, which marks them out as dangerously subversive in such a car mad culture, and secondly they dared to buy a wreck of a house and renovate it much like the British would do. Now the Germans are not afraid to proffer an opinion if they think it is in your best interest, so it was no surprise that the next door neighbour actually came out, uninvited, to tell them while they were moving in that they were making a mistake in buying the place. I can testify that the only problem with the house is that it stands next to the neighbour's ugly 1980s block of flats. 

Inevitably, it isn't long before observations about german farms start creeping in and it was interesting to note the differences in farming culture between the UK and Germany. To begin with, walking around a German village you can still detect the smell of a manure pile in even the most yummy mummy of family areas. This is the result of an accident of history which means that instead of wild and lonely Devon-style farmhouses, most German farms are located within a village limits for security and mutual defence. Unlike our culture, which has seen few real instances of burning and pillage since the civil war, or a night out in Torquay on a Saturday, German farmers have faced a succession of invasions and preying robber barons over the centuries. Sticking together made sense, even if in a modern context everyone is likely to moan about the smell of your barns. Indeed, village manure piles can be a hazard, I remember my father had to rescue "a tired and emotional" neighbour who failed to negotiate the bend leading to his house and ended up in the local farmer's muck heap. 

Inevitably, the business side is harder in Germany as farms are universally small and landownership tends to get split up by inheritance claims - in Germany you have "Erberecht" (the right to your inheritance) which often condemns farms to be endlessly subdivided amongst squabbling siblings. However, the basic smallscale of the system works to its avantage. The European subsidy system tends to reward such enterprises with higher payments, which combined with far lower costs (no need for tractors if your animals are shut in a barn all the time) means a relatively better living. To illustrate the point, while I was in Germany, the Suddeutsche Zeitung had a rather good interview with a young German dairy farmer who had just been named "Bavarian milker of the year". Bizarrely, this is based on a theory test (?) but the most interesting point in the interview was this young man could make a living out of a mere 160 dairy cows.  British farmers would look on in envy at this as 350 is now considered the minimum level of economic viability for milking herds. 

So, in conclusion, in the Fatherland small is beautiful when it comes to agriculture (agrikultur?) which doesn't apply to cars, or thankfully, beer.