Farm visits

One of the lovely things about going to agricultural conferences is the field trip. On this trip we visited a 100 ha goat farm, making cheese and selling goat meat, a therapy farm where monks from the Benedictine tradition make organic herb tea mixtures and a 1000 ha farm rebuilding on the abandoned infrastructure of a soviet collective farm. All organic of course. Afterwards we were treated to a feast and folklore evening.

The goat farm runs 500 goats on about 100 ha of land. The goats free range and the farm grows on the male kids to six months when they are slaughtered for meat (many farms will kill the male goats at birth). They try to let the goats display as natural behaviour as possible including not dehorning or them or castrating the male ones. (This is an important principle in organic farming - which is not just about not using pesticides or fertilisers). They also keep a few geese around the goat sheds which help control some parasites that affect the goats. I've heard of companion planting before (see below) but never companion herding!

Our second visit was to a therapy farm in the heart of the forest. Its a newly established venture though, judging by the age of the apple trees in the orchard, the land has been cultivated for some time. Here the monks and the people in their programme (with drug or alcohol addictions who want to - but don't very often- go clean) grow about fifty varieties of herbs and gather about the same amount (plus wild mushrooms) from the surrounding forest. They produce tea mixes, organically certified and apparently quite a well known brand name in Lithuania. Two things of interest (to me) from this visit: one was their use of companion planting (see second photo) using hosters to attract slugs away from their strawberry patch. This made me think that the Benedictines have several hundred years worth of gardening knowledge (predating industrial farming) and were one of the earliest groups of literate people in Western society. Their written texts will go back 500 years, so I bet that they have a few organic techniques tucked away in their libraries (research project anyone??). The second interesting feature was their solar drier. While they purposefully cultivate their gardens manually, they are not against employing modern technology in their processing. This dryer - with a surface area of 1400 square metres generates almost 50Kwh of electricity and is used to dry the herbs. Probes, sensors and software are used to set the system to get the tea mixtures down to the desired level of humidity - at which point the system is turned off (it probably turns itself off) and a new batch is loaded. An interesting mix of tradition and high-tech - and a delicious lunch to follow.

Our final farm visit was to an industrial scale organic farm, based on the ruins of an old soviet collective farm. They've renovated parts of the infrastructure and got some rather state of the art farming kit (see second photo), courtesy of European Rural Development funding. They have 1000 ha (technically two farms of 500 ha each as the Lithuanian government has just passed a law forbidding farms larger than 500 ha in an effort to prevent land grabbing/speculation/consolidation) where they grow buckwheat and peas in a simple rotation (on very sandy soil) - which are largely exported. With such modern equipment they must be the envy of the neighbours - which is probably why they have had to resort to putting a chain link fence around their diesel tanks and installing two very fierce Rottweilers to guard it. I guess that solves the problem of a 'leaking' diesel tank

<

We ended the day at a village just a kilometre or so from this farm. All clapperboard houses and pretty gardens, a nationally recognised cultural monument. A night of feasting and folklore was arranged in their village hall a garage converted into the village hall for the night. They proudly showed a film about their local village traditions (weaving, singing and folk music, traditional baking, a communal sauna, bath-house etc). We were treated to a wonderful display of folklore traditions dancing and singing and a feast of local foods (preceded by speeches by the local mayor, district development co-ordinator, head of cultural affairs etc., etc. etc.). The village clearly pulled out all the stops to make 100 or so guests representing most European countries feel welcome.

The film about the village that we were shown at the start of the evening also spoke proudly about the modernisation of their village which has a clinic, a library with books and a fire engine, yet as the evening wore on and mother nature exerted her call, it also became clear that the village lacked flush toilets as one had to use a wooden outhouse. (I suspect it also lacks piped water as every house had it's own working well). Ecological indeed, but perhaps uncomfortable in the freezing depths of winter. While not unused to using dry toilets it came as surprise to me to be in a village less than two hours drive from a modern European capital city where facilities that most Europeans take for granted are not available. Lithuania experiences a double brain drain - from the rural areas to the cities and then from the cities to other European countries (it has lost more than 10% of its population to migration in the past twenty years). One wonders how many of the boys and girls who put on the dancing display for us this evening will still be in the village in five years time.