Europe

                        We had walked up the road from the Norwegian farmer’s neat, well cared for farmstead, past his stacks of sawlogs and then the piles of firewood he had cut last winter, which would soon be cut to stove length and palleted for delivery to his customers in the winter.  He pointed out to me that the firewood was from a brushy tree which needed to be cut in winter to be of decent quality and that it would simply rot and become punky if worked in the summer.  We continued up the slope until we came out at the area near the top where the logs had come from.  After looking around at the numerous brushy trees still standing that would go for firewood in the winter, I noticed several small brooks running into the tall stand of trees below us.  My host said he wanted to show me something and motioned for me to follow him as he plunged into the stand of tall trees just down slope and followed the brook for about two hundred yards until he stopped and looked around. 

“See anything?”  he asked me. 

I looked, but saw only the big trees I had noticed in the first place.

“Look over here.  See the outlines where the walls stood?  This is where he lived, I think.  Probably had a considerable tribe of kids.  See that deeper place in the corner?  Probably kept his potatoes there.  And that flatter spot over there?  He could have milked a cow there under a lean-to, when he was lucky enough to have a cow.  Over there, where the trees are some younger and smaller?  Garden probably.  Next to the water.  Hundred fifty years ago, I would guess.  Maybe a bit more.” 

My Norwegian friend was hitting his stride now:

“He probably worked on the larger farms when he could.  They would hire temporary, just like some of us hire the Polish now.  When times were tough, they didn’t hire.  People starved.  I figure, after one of those famines, when he got work again for a while, he made up his mind he would book passage with whatever kids he had left and his wife and head out for America.  Couldn’t be worse than here.”

            He sat on his log for a long time, just looking at the ruins of the hut and lost in his thoughts.  Then he said:

“Think of it.  It was a lot of him that started the farming in your country.   Extra people from Europe.  They was used to scratching out a living from the forest-starving when they had nothing to eat.  Hangin’ on by their fingernails.  No land to call their own.  No hope.” 

            I just shook my head.  No wonder they thought America was paradise!  No wonder, too, that we Americans are all so hard to get along with politically.  It’s in the breeding.  And I was struck once again by the change in both attitude and circumstance in Europe.  It is easy today to find people in the U.S. who are “hanging on by their fingernails”.  They are on every street corner and under every freeway underpass.  They live under cardboard and sleep on rags.  Their numbers grow daily.  Technology and the unrestrained market drove their grandparents from the land several generations ago and unrestrained technology and globalization has driven them from the jobs they took when they left the farms.  They are extra.  I don’t see this in Western Europe.  Perhaps I don’t look in the right place.  Certainly it wouldn’t be the first thing a host would want to show a guest about his country.  But still, I doubt it. 

            One reason for doubting it is the farms themselves.  This was the second Norwegian farm I have seen in the course of several trips to Europe.  We were to see three more this time, a dairy, a deer/hog farm, and a farrow to finish operation just across the road from our host’s farm.  In 2007 we had stayed for some time on a German hog/grain farm-which we were to see again this time-and had visited another hog farm there, plus a dairy.  On our way home this year, we would stay for two nights on a farm in Iceland and visit one other.  And what I find in common everywhere is the lack of a feeling among these farmers that their government is out to drive them off their farms.  Virtually all these farms are livestock farms and I have talked at some length with the farmers.  I don’t hear the anxiety that is always there in American farming circles about something like a national livestock identification system.  To Europe those rules are just another nuisance to live with.  Here in the U. S. farmers are certain the government and industry will use those rules to drive them out of the business.  This is a specific example of what I would call a general attitude.  European farmers appear happier with their work and their lives.  Their farms show it.  The buildings are expensive and built to last.  When it is needed they are repaired.  The farmers take vacations.  They have a family life.  They mostly feel that they are stable and secure.      

            If you assume, as I do, that their governments are probably as foolish and frequently wrong headed as ours is, this is a puzzle.  Because very often Europeans are able to get their governments to support and enable a decent working life for them.  Perhaps it is the corruption in our government.  Though I take it as a given that all governments are corrupt, ours is spectacularly so with the way it is constantly awash in money both criminal and otherwise wanting to get its way. 

            But to American eyes, some things seem very badly out of whack.  The Norwegian dairy we visited, for example, was picture perfect beautiful.  Situated on a gentle hill, the downslopes were covered in well managed and maintained pastures in among the trees, plus a small field of oats that had just been harvested.  Inside the barn things were clean and well maintained.  As was so common, the main and newer barn had just been added to the farm’s original barn, a structure perhaps three hundred years old and which looked like it could well stand another three centuries.  The older part was used for feed and bedding storage, for feed mixing and processing and as an entry and clothes changing area for the farmers, both of whom worked on the farm.  Like every other European farm I have seen, technology was in plentiful supply; I have seen no European operation as primitive as my own.  Before midafternoon lunch in the farm house, the farmers showed us their new machine shed with built in grain dryer, their Claas combine,  two new John Deere tractors and the implements they pulled and pointed out the upstairs apartment at one end fitted out as living quarters for the Polish hired hand.  We were startled to find out later over strong coffee and a huge variety of sweets in the farm house that all this was supported by milking just sixteen cows.  I had assumed the few cows I saw in the barn were simply being held back from pasture for the day.   It was evidently the whole herd. 

            We saw this kind of thing on the hog farm across from our host’s farm as well.  Two barns connected together housed seventy five sows and their progeny all the way to market.  The hogs were modern to the point of being ultra lean.  Technology was plentiful.  All heat, geothermal cooling, ventilation air, ration mixing and feeding was under computer control.  This small hog operation, plus a small bee keeping business run by the older couple who had hosted us the evening before supported two families.  And again, on our way home I saw my first robotic milker on a dairy farm in Iceland, milking a herd of 65 cows which supported two families.  This was the largest dairy in Iceland.  This over the top amount of government involvement and sponsorship was evident in all areas that are difficult for agriculture, such as Norway and Iceland.  In Germany, where the climate is friendlier, the farm sizes and operation seemed more realistic to me. 

            Europe has its reasons, no doubt.  It has experienced starvation and unending war on its own soil.  Now they have had peace on the continent since WWII.  It is not surprising that they want to be sure of their sources.  Europe’s solutions cannot be ours.  But at the same time, their satisfaction with their farms, the prospects for a decent life, the relative assurance of tenure on the land and a rural future for at least some of the next generations cannot be a bad thing.  Our way will be different, because we are.  But stability and a decent livelihood for its citizens ought to be the goal for any government.  We need to start expecting it of ours again.