Your question interested me as I have been following farming families in
England - My grandmother Edith Sophia Flemme married into generations of
Norfolk, England, farming labour and my husband studied at an Agriculture
college, and was from farmers in Suffolk, England. I believe responses from
Germany will echo the experiences of the U.K. The U.S.A. is so large it
still has fields stretching to the horizon, whereas on this side of the 'big
pond', fields are more like 'handkerchiefs'. The 1871 census showed sons
had moved away from the farms following the industrial revolution which
of fishing boats. The new railway lines were in demand sending fish inland
where ordinary people were for the first time eating saltwater fish which
was once the province of the rich or the coastal population. In the 1950's,
due to years of farms growing smaller by being split among sons when their
father died, the authorities introduced a law which introduced a minimum
acreage, which stopped the loss of food producing land. In those days you
could still see horse drawn ploughs, but many farms joined together to buy
the newly designed 'combined harvester'. You may be interested to know that
from Spring to Harvest time there was movement of farmhands - e.g. for
centuries men from Ireland 'did the rounds', living in the barns, and went
home to their families in winter, nowadays it is college students taking a
'gap' year who pick crops on the land. The 2001 British village population
on paper looks like yours, however, the cottages are too expensive for the
local villagers to buy, they are owned by company executives for use as
'holiday homes'. Where a small farm employed 20 full time workers, the
farmer will now only employ one more with family and neighbours helping out
when needed. To stop the land eroding and to keep the wild-life, we have
kept our hawthorn hedges, which need 'layering' each year - If you are in
the vicinity of 'Highgrove House' you will even see Prince Charles layering
his hedgerows - he's very good at it.
Rena
Hi: Thanks for the response.
When I was a kid, the farmers in Iowa worked cooperatively. One farmer may own
one kind of equipment and another farmer another kins of equipment and so on.
They would work together to get maximum use out of the machinery so each farmer
would not have to buy a "full set" of equipment for the farm.
Also there used to be considerable commercial harvesting. When I was in
college, I would start operating a Combine in Oaklahoma and wind up the season
in North Dakota.
I am not familiar with "layering." Most of the conservation here is done with a
laser level which keeps equipment on a level path (contour) so that there are no
tracks up or down a hill, they just go around the hills. Also there is rotation
of crops from cultivated (corn beans, etc) to hay, small grains and grass. Many
times they are planted in wide strips of alternating crops, which also helps.
Things change. Right now Iowa farmers are selling "Corn Squeezings" to
California for their SUV's. The result very little corn is going to feed
cattle. Guess what is happening to the price of beef? They get 2.5 gallons of
alcohol per bushel of corn. I am assuming that with the smaller farms of
Europe, that the land is reserved strictly for food. However, whenever
alternative uses for farm land are found anywhere in the world, the price of
food goes up.
Gale Bösche : gale@bosche.info
County Iowa
Grandfather and others who settled in Crawford County are from Anderten Amt
Hoya in the KOH