Saturday 3 June 2017

Agriculture in Czech

As far as agricultural production goes in Czech, as i understand the story goes something like this in Czech. During the communist times, the agriculture in Czech was centralised and each town or city had co-operative, that controlled the lands. After the communism had finished, the lands were given back to the owners of the lands before the communism started and the co-operatives were privatised into companies. The problem now seems that its not easy to have a small production and get into the "milk chain" for example, the co-operatives have a kind of monopoly still on the collection. There opinion is that its not possible to control the quality of the small farms produce. The only option that a small owner of the land really has around Zbiroh it seems, is to rent the land to the co-operative, who then would use it to produce milk.  At christmas i was in South Tyrol, the system is different. The co-operatives in South Tyrol is owned by the farmers, the amount of production and services the farmer uses of the co-operative, for apple is juice production for example, is what they pay for the use of the co-operaive. I'm not sure what is more effective, yet for sure in South Tyrol they have a lot of diversity in the production and high production. In Czech they don't have much diversity, and the production although it might be high, its got very few players, so the distribution of the rewards from the farming is not so good. I see these kind of situations more and more in Czech. I suggested to the local co-operative that they might start collection for organic produce for small farms and sell the produce in Germany. Most organic farming is done best by people that have smaller farms and a passion for it, the private corporate  ex "co-operatives" I don't think would be able to get that kind of quality. So the regions are really missing out, because of the old system that is still in place. You can find the website for the local co-operaive here in Zbiroh. I don't think they are looking to sell anything to anyone other than the same buyers point since 1990, the site at least looks this way.

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