This One Time in Germany…

Photo credit: Dan Fleming

Our son Peter always wanted to live and work somewhere overseas. To prepare, he took several years of classes while in school studying the Japanese language and culture. Upon graduating from Purdue University in Visual Performing Arts, a major in Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts that surprisingly I was told, nearly rivals engineering in terms of the number of students, Pete sent applications to teach either music or drama in several foreign countries including Japan. Japan though didn’t bite. However, Germany did, and off he went, accepting a position at an international school in Berlin.

Peter doesn’t get back to the states very often, but Lynne and I have been following a plan to travel to Germany every other year, and this was our year. We recently spent two weeks in country, but not in Berlin this time. Pete has taken a job in Hamburg, in the southern edge of Schleswig-Holstein, the northern most state in Germany. Most of Holstein lies on a latitude above the Canadian border. Its northernmost region borders the North Sea to the west, and the Baltic Sea to the east, and shares a latitude line near Juno Alaska.

I was particularly pleased with the chance to visit Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein in general. This is the area where Henry Ernest (pronounced Ernst probably then), my great grandfather came from, when he immigrated to the United States in the eighteen hundreds.

For part of our stay, we traveled north to Kappeln, now a resort area on a harbored coast of the Baltic Sea. Upon leaving Hamburg, I got the chance to see some rural landscape of northern Germany and consciously compare it to the farm fields back home.

The first thing I noticed was that the fields were smaller than the average in southern Indiana. Hedges lined the five-to-ten-acre fields verry neatly with strait edges and square corners. The shapes and size made me guess they were planned and created at a time when small livestock was the principal operation. I imagined grazing areas alternated with small grain production from year to year. Now though there were few farmsteads with visible livestock of any kind.

Also absent was any sign of row crop production. This was mid-April and no winter worn cornstalk trash was seen. The wheat fields were beautiful, however. Each were a deep weedless green. The obviously nitrogen fed first leaves of spring completely filled in between the drilled rows. Speaking of rows, in the winter wheat fields across the Midwest states of home, it is common to see the tracks of sprayers or spreaders in young wheat. They are marked by trails of smashed down plants made by narrow treaded tires. Here those trails appear to be permanent. Pairs of parallel, bare dirt tracks and evenly spaced, about two sprayer boom’s distance apart can be seen stretching from one end of the field to the other, and repeated from one side to the opposite. 

I will admit that it puzzled me as to how that was done and why. The drill at planting should have put seed in those tracks but there was nothing growing there at all. They could have plugged certain holes in the seed drill, but that would have been a lot of trouble, and the driver would have been a better one than me and about everyone I know for sure, even with auto steer. As to why, maybe it was to save seed or moisture because running over the crop would diminish the yield at least a little. Or, such a practice would eliminate the expense of a GPS guidance system. Traveling the Autobahn highway as we were, I didn’t have the chance to interview a local producer about the matter. My German conversing skills are pretty much nonexistent anyway.

However, a little Google research indicated that my guesses were not far off. The tracks are called tramlines and are created indeed by plugging specific drill holes at planting. The benefits include: cutting down on soil compaction by restricting sprayer and spreader traffic to one area; eliminating crop damage to the standing crop; making it easier for operators to eliminate skips and overlaps during various operations. Also, it is believed that plants next to the tramlines do better with less competition thus partially compensating for the loss of seeded ground.

In Germany, the use of tramlines are a part of an initiative for intensive farming called Controlled Traffic farming (CTF). CTF is being encouraged to support more sustainable management practices. Here in the U.S., “Successful Farming” magazine has posted articles featuring producers who are making use of tramlines in tandem with late-season applications of products such as fungicides.

In addition to wheat and fall planted barley, the most attractive crop we could observe is a plant most commonly seen near and across our northern border, rapeseed. Not grown at all to my knowledge in southern Indiana due to our warm climate, rapeseed from a distance and at 120 kilometers an hour, looks a little like alfalfa, except for it’s brilliant yellow blossoms. Rapeseed is a close genetic relative to canola which is a major crop in Canada. Canola, however, has been modified through plant breeding and selection to be lacking in erucic acid which makes the oil produced from it’s seed suitable for human consumption. Canola produces the high quality cooking oil found in most kitchens in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere. Rapeseed oil however, also a major crop grown in Canada and northern Europe, is used in industry as a lubricant.

Further north in our travels, I did finally see in one field, remnants of a 2025 corn crop. That was a surprise given the climate. However, wind patterns are unusual in northern Europe and with the somewhat stabilization effect of the nearby North Sea, corn is evidently possible there with a good, early maturing variety.

I saw bigger fields of winter wheat further north, and more tillage was in progress. The topography was that of rolling hills and I was disappointed to see a fair amount of tillage that climbed up and down with the slope. Although the tillage was most probably in preparation for spring barley, so actual drilling direction may curb erosion.

I will admit to not knowing much about growing barley, but I was surprised that I did not see any indication of no-till farming at all. I have read that spring barley prefers soil temperatures just above freezing, so I would think no-till would work as well as warmer tilled soil. But I am a Yankee and a long way from home and familiar doings.

By the way, although I was in Schleswig-Holstein, I did not see a single Holstein cow. But the people were friendly enough, and the Hamburgers in Hamburg were, pretty good!