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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Growing a new agriculture in Poland
  • Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:55:01 -0600


Growing a new agriculture in Poland
Old breeds, new ideas are helping small farms
Posted by Erik Hoffner (Guest Contributor) at 4:40 PM on 13 Oct 2008
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/10/13/95335/048



I just returned from a 10 day photo assignment covering the efforts of Heifer
Project -- Poland to return heritage/locally-adapted breeds of chickens,
geese, cattle, and pigs to small farmers struggling to keep a foothold in
this changing country. These breeds in many cases are already making a
difference. One of these, the Polish Red Cattle, requires very little feed to
produce milk with a super high cream content -- an important attribute in
regions like this with harsh climates.
heifer_sign

This program is a spot of good news for this heavily agricultural country --
it has the highest percentage of people engaged in farming (~22 percent) in
Europe -- but many are struggling in the aftermath of the Soviet era that
dictated what and how people farmed, followed by the volatile market reforms,
and then the strict new E.U. rules about how meat, dairy products, and crops
are produced.

That's what I'd read in the New York Times this spring, in a story which
reported that interest in buying local is thin, and the market for organic is
even thinner. And this is largely what I saw there -- people preferred to buy
vegetables from Germany, and farms I visited were wondering what their market
would be in the future. Ironically, most of these farms were already organic
because of the prohibitive cost of chemical amendments, but hadn't bothered
with the paperwork. Most small farmers don't sell at all, but consume what
they grow -- pure subsistence.

So I was really surprised to arrive home and have one of the editors here at
Orion forward me this upbeat Polish agriculture story in a recent edition of
the Christian Science Monitor.

heifer_swan"Poland's organic farms prove to be fruitful ventures" proclaimed
that "eating local is a way of life" in Poland, and interviewed a shopper
happy to pay extra for organic. Certainly some folks are, but that attitude
may have much more to do with proximity to large urban centers like Warsaw
and Krakow than a general attitude.

I think the NYT reporter was closer to getting it right, but that's a tall
order when covering such a complex and culturally-rich country. One thing I
can say is that Poles are very forward thinking -- all 16 states of this very
conservative country have defied the E.U. in banning genetically modified
organisms outright. Organic and local will certainly take off -- it may just
be a matter of shedding the all-too-recent memories of the bad days when
eating local was more of a survival strategy. In the meanwhile, the
community-building work that the Heifer Project is doing to connect and
uplift small-scale farmers is laying that groundwork nicely.





  • [Livingontheland] Growing a new agriculture in Poland, Tradingpost, 10/23/2008

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