German farmers are feeling the squeeze

DW (English)

New animal welfare laws are aiming to make life easier for dairy cows. But farmers are being pushed to the limit. They don't know how to finance new barns and other necessary infrastructure in the face of planned subsidy cuts.

Transcript

00:00 This tractor is more than 60 years old.

00:06 But it's still used almost every day on the Buchner family farm in Bavaria.

00:12 Every year the Buchners use around 11,000 liters of diesel.

00:16 The government used to subsidize the expense with a partial tax refund dedicated to agriculturally used diesel.

00:24 Used to because Berlin says it can no longer afford this.

00:28 If we no longer get that money, that's money we can no longer invest,

00:33 like when a machine breaks, when repairs are necessary at the barn.

00:37 We just won't have the money for that anymore and there's things we couldn't do.

00:42 The end of the diesel tax rebate would hit family farms especially hard.

00:47 The Buchner farm is one of the smaller ones in Germany with 60 hectares of land and 40 dairy cows.

00:54 Christoph Buchner is 23 years old. He just finished his training and got his master's diploma.

01:00 The barn he works in was built by his grandfather.

01:03 The cattle spend summers outside on the pasture.

01:06 In winter the cows are in here, tied to their gates.

01:10 They got a beautiful coat, they produce a lot of milk.

01:15 In winter they gain some weight. They're pretty happy.

01:19 My cows are doing just fine. I know that for sure.

01:27 They look good. When a cow is sick or doesn't feel well, she won't gain weight and she won't produce milk.

01:35 Animal rights activists in the Department of Agriculture in Berlin disagree.

01:42 Tying cows up inside a barn is not appropriate to the species, they say.

01:47 They want to ban the practice. A law is already being worked on.

01:53 We are planning to amend the animal rights laws with a new paragraph, 3a.

01:59 So in future cattle can't be tied up anymore. There's going to be a phase-out over five years.

02:07 Wolfgang Scholz of the Agricultural Union wants to stop the initiative.

02:12 It would be the end of the Buchner farm and approximately 10,000 other dairy farms across the country.

02:18 There is, however, a back door. The cows can stay inside if they get out of the barn twice a week to trot around.

02:25 But there's a house and there's a house and over there's a church and there's just not enough space.

02:31 This will never be allowed. It's not possible.

02:35 Christoph Buchner is frustrated. He wants to continue farming here.

02:40 The only clear path for him to invest more than one million euros in a barn outside of town.

02:45 Then again, the end of diesel tax refunds and volatile prices for milk are frightening farmers.

02:51 They don't see how they could possibly invest these kinds of money.

02:55 You take over a farm, you want to preserve it, you want to invest and expand it,

03:00 but I certainly don't want to ruin this business so I could lose it one day.

03:05 That I couldn't live with.

03:09 There are some government aid programs to help, but the Buchners feel overwhelmed by the bureaucracy.

03:15 They just want to keep going like they did for generations.

03:19 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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