Hursh Consulting & Communications Inc.

More than 300 young European farmers gathered for a young farmer’s event at Agritechnica tonight in Hannover, Germany. They listened to presentations from producers who have moved to other parts of the world to farm.

One of the presenters was Christoph Rosnack who came from Austria and bought a farm north of Estevan, Saskatchewan a couple years ago. He’s developing an organic grain farm on about 1,300 hectares.

While 2010 was a reasonable year for him, 2011 was a washout. Still, he remains optimistic and happy with his decision to move to Canada.

Quite a different story came from Stefan Duerr, who grew up on a small farm in Germany. He was the first farmer from Germany to move to Russia when it opened up in 1989. Today, his company has 170,000 hectares and tens of thousands of dairy cows in a number of operations across the country. His goal is 300,000 hectares and 25,000 dairy cows by 2015.

There were great questions by the young people for all the panel participants. However, there seemed to be more interest in coming to Canada or Australia to develop a family farm than seeking fortune in a Russian mega farm.

 I’m Kevin Hursh.

I’m in Hannover, Germany, the location for Agritechnica 2011. Held every two years, Agritechnica is the largest farm equipment show in the world. There are 24 massive halls filled with farm equipment. About half of the 2,750 exhibitors are from Germany with the other half from countries around the world. There are 48 Canadian exhibitors, mostly from Saskatchewan and Manitoba. As you would expect, this is a major show for companies like John Deere and New Holland and they spend a tremendous amount of money to host literally tens of thousands of customers. What’s surprising is the number of big European companies with impressive displays that are little known names in North America. It’s also surprising to see the amount of equipment devoted to tillage. While direct seeding in the norm in Western Canada, in many other regions of the world, the plows and rippers and cultivators just keep getting bigger and more elaborate. You might think that since farms are smaller in Europe that the equipment would be small. Most of the equipment lacks our extreme width, but there are still lots of huge high clearance sprayers and much of the equipment for applying liquid manure is massive. Stay tuned for more from Agritechnica. I’m Kevin Hursh.