Romania Farming

Hello to all AG-world fellowers!

Now and finally I want to summarize what I discovered, while passing the entire country of Romania from South to North! I am already a few thousand miles into Russia, but riding across that country is very difficult and exhausting to me, so I was only focused on getting forward each day. 

So, see now what I saw and who I met in Romania … 

My first day I drove across the area called “Walachei”. A flat region, where a lot Gipsy’s live and many small fields with different crops exist. I decided to do “stealth camping” (I like this slogan ;-) out of sight from anybody. So I put up my tent at the edge of a corn field…

Next day I found this tractor parked beside the road and didn’t know what the cross was standing for?

Till sbdy. passed by and explained me it means, the vehicle is totally wracked!

Now thinking about it, it makes totally sense…  ;-)

He also told me that the price is about 1.400 Euros.

So I left the man and his tractor and kept going North till I suddenly saw these bunch of people dealing with something?

I went closer and asked what was going on and for permission to take some pictures, which they didn’t deny. They explained this is the distribution of wheat harvest to the local farmers.

In Romania the majority of farm land belongs to big foreign investors, but the local farmers do the work. Not only paying them with money, they receive some grain or other goods for their own needs, because most of them have a few animals as well at home to feed themselves. I’ve got told in this particular case the landlord was a Spanish guy, but also Germans and Frenchs making business this way here in Romania.

So every filled bag goes to the scale, a very old style scale! :-)

and afterwards on the farmers trailer...

As you see the small farmers here are not very well equipped…

Some of them even don’t have one full horse power.

;-)

So if the trailer is really fully loaded…

… it sometimes is possible, that the farmer has to …

… pump up the tires, also the “old style” way!

Pretty nice stop I had and experience of “old style” farming!!

I met some fellow bikers from the area while riding upwards a really nice passo and we shared the road for a few hours and went for lunch together...

I also told them about a problem on my front tire and they made some phone calls and then brought me to Ivan…

who did determine the problem, but didn’t have the parts to fix it. :-/ 

But he knew sbdy. on my road, so I stopped by there the next day and got the problem fixed! :-)

I kept going North across the area called “Transilvania”. Maybe sbdy. knows "Bram Stokers" books about Dracula. They take part in this area of the world.

I look pretty strange on this picture ...  :-/

Later on I saw this guy running across the fields…

and watched for a while...

till his DEUTZ-FAHR “chaser-bin” appeared 

;-)

It’s a 4-walker combine named BRAUD from France

Unfortunately they didn’t speak any English or German, so we couldn’t communicate very detailed. I did watch them a little bit longer and recognized the boy was doing quite a good job with clean grain and not many loose on the ground...

I also tried to figure out which "06er" modell the tractor was..

but I couldn't. Assuming an 100 06.

After two and a half hours I took off.

If you want to know how the Romanians irrigate their small corn fields, watch this!

:-)

Making Hay Romania, they use two different strategies, both without any machines.

They cut everything by hand, let it dry and gather the whole family to rake it together 

and put in onto the wodden trailer

The drivers, mainly the head of the family, are usually very friendly and smile to me!

Second method is to use these “barriers” which I recognized very often, mainly while drying the Luzerne (and regular ones, as well), it’s not real Alfalfa here…

In this particular case they have cut it just one day ago, a young boy explained me, who I met at the edge of the field.  Very soon they will put everything on the barriers...

And the whole field looks like this

When the hay is totally dry they either pile it or store it inside the barn. Usually the fill up the barn first and then pile the rest…

The young boy was very happy to get on the picture! :-)

This is a brief summary about the ag-world in the small country of Romania, which I recognized along my way. I'm in Russia now at my girl-friend Milas hometown. During the last week I saw so many crazy things and met strange, funny and really nice people to fill two more  post! But one thing at a time…

Byebye for now...

The world-ag-traveller

Alex