[LINK] British Farmers in Estonia

[rfmcdonald]

Europe's farmers, rather than crossing the Atlantic, seem to be interested in heading east, as Graham Bowley's International Herald Tribune article "British farmers grow roots in Estonia" indicates. Sample text:

"We thought there was a hard time ahead for farming and we had to do something different," said Clifton Lampard, a farmer from Leicestershire who bought a bankrupt dairy farm near Turi, an hour south of Estonia's capital, Tallinn, in 2002.

A year later, he bought two more Estonian farms with a group of Norwegian and English investors and, with his wife, helps to run them alongside the farm they still rent in England.

"I came out here and thought, this all adds up," he says.

The reason it added up can be seen today in the green countryside around Turi and Tartu. Dilapidated Soviet barns and lines of pine forests, home to storks and wild boar, punctuate vast stretches of land, most of it untouched since the collapse of the old planned economy.

The newcomers discovered that if they cleared the soil and worked it, the local government would give it to them more or less for free. The land is so plentiful and cheap that many of the foreigners cannot always even say exactly how much real estate they own. For them, it was a pleasing contrast to Britain's crowded and expensive isle.

"I was selling land in Scotland for over £2,000 an acre and buying it in Estonia for £25 an acre," said Neil Godsman, from Aberdeenshire, who owns a dairy and grain farm in central Estonia.