Posted on 01/12/2012 5:45:56 PM PST by DeaconBenjamin
In the 18th century, Catherine the Great invited German farmers to come to Russia and cultivate the land. Over two centuries later, the country is recruiting Teutonic pioneers once again to put vast tracts of fallow land to use. The land holds great opportunities for agricultural entrepreneurs -- provided they have strong nerves.
Stefan Dürr, 47, is now the owner of more than 170,000 hectares (about 420,000 acres) of prime Russian farmland. He is cultivating fields in the Kursk, Voronezh, Orenburg, Novosibirsk and Kaluga regions. Through his holding company, EkoSem-Agrar, he employs 2,800 people in farming, owns a herd of 28,000 cattle and most recently generated revenues of €80 million ($102 million). In good years, he earned €200 million selling agricultural machinery, a business he has since spun off. According to Dürr, EkoNiva, one of his subsidiaries, is among the top 30 agricultural companies in Russia.
Russia is once again courting Western settlers to revive a farming industry that is ailing in some areas.
Dürr has, in fact, attracted imitators. The Westphalian meat baron Clemens Tönnies wants to build 10 new pig farms, which are expected to produce 62,500 tons of meat a year. It promises an investment of more than €100 million in the Voronezh region.
Eckart Hohmann farms 29,000 hectares 400 kilometers (250 miles) south of Moscow. His "Rheinland Farm" produces brewers' yeast, seed grain and wheat. "The Russians practically forced the land on us," says Hohmann. The business already achieved profitability some time ago.
Some 23 million hectares of fertile farmland is currently not being used in Russia. Much of this land is in the coveted Black Earth Region. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, collectives everywhere went bankrupt, and the country was forced to import grain.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
A number of these German immigrants migrated to North Dakota.
And in 50 years, they will re-collectivize these farms and murder the descendents of those moving there now.
Amazing, Russia is trying ot build it’s country and we are trying to destroy ours.
***In the 18th century, Catherine the Great invited German farmers to come to Russia and cultivate the land.***
And what did Stalin do to these German speaking Russians when WWII broke out? It wasn’t pretty.
And you know this how?
They also migrated in large numbers to Western Kansas.
I was once at our gun club, shooting a gorgeous old Argentine Mauser. It was made in 1909 by DWM in Berlin and the workmanship was off the charts.
Anyway there were a couple of other shooters at the range and they came over and we talked for a while. I showed them the old Mauser and they laughed and began talking in German clearly impressed with it.
These people had been in America since around the 1890s and they still could speak German.
Being a descendent of those myself, but ones immigrating to South Dakota, my great grandmother once recalled to me how soldiers came to concript the men for some war, when they had supposedly been guaranteed exemption from such service. Those refusing were lined up in a ditch and shot. I wouldn’t put too much faith in Russian agreements, knowing their history.
ummm... History?
Finally the ‘living space’ they were promised back in the 1940’s!
The murders of large numbers of prosperous ethnic-German farmers in the 1930s under Stalin made their relatives back in Germany extremely nervous about Communists, and led to support of Hitler as the only leader willing to fight them.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln,_Nebraska
” North Bottoms: Directly north of UNL’s downtown campus, the North Bottoms is an area in the floodplain of Salt Creek that holds many smaller houses now rented by a large number of UNL students. Its proximity to Memorial stadium combined with a high student population makes it one of the main tailgating headquarters during NE college football home games. It was originally the northern part of the “German” or “Russian” bottoms settled by Volga-German refugees from Russia.”
Many Russian Germans that came without money to buy farm land settled here.
They were Stalin’s Kulaks.
History is a fickle mistress.
They’ve been trying to do land reform since over 100 years ago.
Everything old is new again. If they manage to get that land under private ownership, that will be a huge step forward.
A mile or so south of there you will find the ‘Germans from Russia’ museum.
FYI
Somebody ought to check to see if German farmers would have any interest in buying Detroit.
So Adolph finally wins?
Somebody tell the folks over at the Hitler
Channel (DTV Ch287). They need to know.
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