A passable farmer can normally make quite a bit more money doing something else (e.g. trucking, carpentry), and those who stay in the biz as independent farmers often do so at a loss, taking outside jobs to support their farms.

According to my truckdriver ex-farmer friend, the only people who can stay in business farming here are “Amish”, who do so by working long lowpaid hours including child labor, never borrowing from banks, minimizing cash purchases (e.g. gasoline and pesticides), and astonishing frugality (not buying shoes for the kids until there’s they go to work or school).

The politics and economics of agriculture is quite a mess. The conventional wisdom is that it should be globalized and rationalized like everything else. I don’t like that, but formulating an alternative program is difficult.

I don’t think the Estonians are migrating to Canada. Estonians as such are probably headed for Tallinn or Tartu (see, “farm, can’t keep them down on”), and such Russian-speakers as remain are headed for points east.

As for Germans who actually get into farming, maybe it’s the scale of things in North America that’s appealing. Also, if they’re Spätaussiedler, then they’re probably coming from places like Ukraine, central Russia and Kazakhstan that are physically and meteorologically much more like prairie Canada than present-day Germany.

When I lived in Germany, I was astonished to see all of the little gardening huts–I’ve totally forgotten the German for them. One of my friends was writing a master’s on the history of them, so I really should remember the right word. They seemed to indicate to me, an outsider who never really accultured, mind you, a nostaglic attachment to living on the land. (And then, of course, one of my friends gave me a Karl May book as a going-away gift.)

As for the German govt supporting such return to the (Canadian) land, I have no good ideas.

“We thought there was a hard time ahead for farming and we had to do something different,” said Clifton Lampard, a farmer from Leicestershire who bought a bankrupt dairy farm near Turi, an hour south of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, in 2002.

A year later, he bought two more Estonian farms with a group of Norwegian and English investors and, with his wife, helps to run them alongside the farm they still rent in England.

“I came out here and thought, this all adds up,” he says.

The reason it added up can be seen today in the green countryside around Turi and Tartu. Dilapidated Soviet barns and lines of pine forests, home to storks and wild boar, punctuate vast stretches of land, most of it untouched since the collapse of the old planned economy.

The newcomers discovered that if they cleared the soil and worked it, the local government would give it to them more or less for free. The land is so plentiful and cheap that many of the foreigners cannot always even say exactly how much real estate they own. For them, it was a pleasing contrast to Britain’s crowded and expensive isle.

“I was selling land in Scotland for over £2,000 an acre and buying it in Estonia for £25 an acre,” said Neil Godsman, from Aberdeenshire, who owns a dairy and grain farm in central Estonia.