Chapter 29

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Chapter 29: Anna’s Farming

Life at school was always difficult for me. I always looked forward to going home for the holidays, back to the familiar land. I missed the carefree rural life of my childhood, running in the fields, playing by the river, and spending days with my innocent friends.

Now I am here, managing the family farm, watching the crops grow every day.

But I am unhappy. I thought the countryside would be my peaceful home, but it does not seem so anymore. I am tired of the dull life here, not wanting to be with annoying seeds and tools all day.

Yet I have to stay here.

After last year’s severe drought and then frost damage, there was no harvest all year. Pressured by high interest loans, we had to sell off two hundred hectares of land to repay debts.

Tax collectors from the city came arrogantly demanding money. Unable to pay with food or money, we had to sell another hundred hectares of land.

My father’s health is deteriorating rapidly, while my useless mother does nothing. The burdens of family life are all on my shoulders, as I watch over these five hundred hectares of land, hoping for a good harvest this year.

I don’t know how to farm at all, I’ve never done any farming before, so I’ll learn.

I went to the library in town to find some books on agriculture, asked for advice from old farmers, and gradually realized that farming isn’t difficult, just hard work.

The land at home is very large, I can’t manage it alone. After some thought, I decided to rent half of the land to farmers for cultivation. I also hired some farm laborers to help me cultivate the other half. This year, I will see which method is more profitable.

Before planting in the spring, I brought in an old farmer from town to ask him what crops would be most suitable for our land.

He suggested barley, as the weather has been a bit dry and hot in recent years. If we continue planting wheat, the harvest may not be good. He recommended planting barley in the spring, followed by radishes and cabbage after the harvest.

"But in our village, everyone has switched to planting potatoes and corn. No one plants barley anymore because it doesn’t sell well," said Anna.

The old farmer responded, "Barley can make good money, you just have to think outside the box. Barley has other uses besides just cooking."

Anna frowned, "Are you talking about making alcohol? I don’t have a permit. According to the Beer Purity Law, farmers without permits cannot sell crops to breweries."

The old farmer chuckled, "Actually, you just need to lower your price a bit, and the brewers will buy. If you’re still worried about the risk, you can collaborate with someone who has a permit to legally sell your crops to the brewery."

If barley is sold directly to the market, the profits are very low when citizens buy it and cook at home. But if it is sold to a brewery to make beer, the profits can be several times higher. However, this has always been the benefit of the young lord and the small noble class. Ordinary rural landowners cannot get the permit to earn money from selling beer.

The old farmer provided two options: sell illegally in secret or find someone with a permit to sell it legally. Anna found both options risky.

Spring is still two to three weeks away, and Anna decides to continue observing.

In the same village, there are more than ten young lords who wait for the planting season. They gather daily at the village inn to drink heavily, boast, and then go home drunk to argue with their wives.

Anna is well-educated. She knows how to read and write, has a good level of culture, and holds progressive life beliefs.

While other rural landowners waste time drinking in the village, Anna stays in the city before the planting season. She continues learning about different agricultural practices, investigates market prices for agricultural products, and studies local agriculture conditions over the past few years. Most importantly, she understands the importance of information.

The village young lords cannot even read, let alone subscribe to newspapers. Although Anna doesn’t have much money, she buys newspapers every day and even subscribes to a whole year’s worth of agricultural newspapers for young lords.

In the coastal areas of North Germany, the warm Atlantic current makes the planting season come earlier. News about agricultural disease quickly appeared in the newspapers. The corn sprouts late, and the leaves have yellow spots once they sprout.

Anna senses trouble. Based on her recent studies in agriculture, she knows that this widespread corn disease didn’t happen overnight. It’s likely related to the seeds, as it had appeared in small areas in the previous years.

She quickly ran back to the village and went to the tavern to tell the villagers, "Be careful when planting corn this year, the seeds might be sick."

But the villagers were all drunk and sleepy, not even Anna’s words were listened to the next day.

When spring came, the whole village planted corn, potatoes, and some people planted rye, only the Bismarck family’s 500 hectares of land planted barley.

At first, there were no problems with the crops in the whole village, and the weather was not as bad as in previous years. The corn in the village seemed healthy, maybe this year would be a good harvest.

By May, almost all the corn started showing signs of illness, with leaves wilting, turning yellow, and even developing black spots.

Anna advised them to give up and plow under these crops, as the disease was severe and it was unlikely that they would bear fruit. They could plant short-term crops to recover in time for the next planting period.

But nobody listened to her, the village Junkers stubbornly believed there was no problem. And some small land farmers couldn’t bear to abandon their crops, hoping that the corn would still yield some harvest.

Then there was a small drought, even the drought-resistant crops suffered yield reductions, and the sick corn plants died directly.

At harvest time, the whole village suffered. Some of the Junker families with hundreds of hectares could not fill a cart with harvested corn. The family that planted rye fared slightly better and did not lose money, but the potatoes also got sick, yielding very small fruits that did not fetch a good price.

The Bismarck family didn’t have a good harvest of barley, the weather was bad, the land wasn’t fertile, and because it was their first year farming, they made many mistakes. However, the results were decent enough. If they sold it in the market, they could probably earn one or two pounds.

Old Bismarck was so happy that he cried. Before, the family had eight hundred hectares of land and always lost money. Now they only had five hundred hectares, but they were able to make a small profit.

Old Bismarck suddenly seemed to feel better. He was running around all day and night, telling everyone about his wonderful daughter. He would go to the village tavern to drink heavily, then end up sleeping drunk on the road.

Anna was tired of complaining about her parents. She was now eager to find a licensed young man to sell the wheat to a brewery.

There were only three licensed young men near the small town, but they all ignored Anna. She took a risk and decided to sell directly to the brewery at a lower price. After some negotiating, she managed to make the sale.

After calculating, Anna’s net profit for this planting season reached 14.2 pounds.

Anna realized that many people had gone bankrupt this year due to the poor harvest. Many small farmers, who were already poor, had to sell their land and become serfs. She quickly went to the bank and borrowed some money. Taking advantage of the low price, she bought all the bankrupt farmers’ land in the village. The Bismarck family’s farm suddenly grew to a total area of 700 hectares.

Old Bismarck greatly admired his daughter. She was truly a genius. He believed that next year, she would not only be able to buy back the land they had sold before, but also make a big profit. He marveled at her talent.

Anna used to think that farming was difficult. Her father had struggled to make a profit from the farm every year. But now that she had taken over, she found that farming wasn’t as hard as she thought, as long as she was willing to learn and work hard.

Anna, "I think with so much land in our family, making money should be easy, right?"

Old Bismarck: …