A few years ago, I was in Oslo, Norway and took a bus tour of the city and the surrounding countryside. I was particularly interested in the country tour going to a distant town and seeing Norwegian methods of farming.
With steep hills down to the fiords, high mountains, small pieces of land, cold winters and short summers, Norway seems an unlikely place to have active farming. The key to achieving this is a tradition of family farming that has continued for centuries. Norwegian farmers are heavily subsided as the government wants as much domestic food production as possible and they are willing to pay farmers for it.
Norwegian farmers take in more subsidies than those of any other country in the world, with 63 percent of their income coming from the government, a recent study from the OECD has reported. Switzerland had the second largest subsidies, representing 56 percent of farmers’ income, while Japan had the third largest, making up 55 percent.
I had expected to see hillside farms and little fields where hay had been taken off the old fashioned way and small wooden barns filled with loose hay or with little square bales. What a surprise! I saw no old time farming in Norway. All the round bales were bagged individually in black plastic and neatly stacked.
We drove through a flat area that looked like it was fairly fertile soil. I was surprised to see a rather large flat valley in Norway that was in wheat production. The grain had been harvested and straw was being round baled. Straw was piled at the edge of the road in black plastic bags. Their land base is small and farmers can’t afford to let their hay and straw sit around and spoil.
Only three percent of Norway’s total area is arable land, and 30 percent of this can be used for grain production and vegetables. The rest of the area can only be used for grass production. In addition, sheep and cattle graze in the mountains during a short, but intensive summer
What puzzled me when we were touring the countryside in some of the northern European countries was the ripe grain fields and no one out there combining. I would see a field of over-ripe grain, some was combined but the combine was just sitting there. I asked a tour guide and was told the farmers are weekend farmers. They work in the city and only combine and do farm work on the weekends. Weekend farmers!
Travel though some European countries you see mostly small fields surrounded by fence rows, brush or trees. I have often asked myself why they don’t remove the nuisance brush trees and make bigger fields. How can they farm little odd shaped fields? I can’t. I posed that question to a Finnish beef farmer at one stop where we were given a tour of the farm operation. The answer: If there’s brush or trees surrounding a field, that’s how it is to stay as nature put it. It’s the law.
The Finnish farmer had a thousand acres of land that was scattered three miles from the house and barns. It was a showcase farm that was set up to receive bus tours. But the fields were all too small for my liking. However, with many Charolais cattle in their feedlot, they certainly weren’t weekend farmers.
