Multumesc*

A vital means of earning a living

There was great solidarity with the agricultural industry when the borders throughout Europe were closed from mid-March onward. At the time, more than 15 Germans offered to work on the portal “The Country Helps.” However, only seven turned up, including four students on a forced break from their studies due to the coronavirus and one programmer. Axel Altenweger anticipated that most of the seven wouldn’t stay long. And he was right: Lectures recommenced online and the programmer also threw in the towel. Just a cook and social worker held out until August and were a welcome enrichment for the monastery estate.

Axel Altenweger’s experience from 30 years in farming have taught him to rely heavily on foreign seasonal workers. “We rarely find people to do this simple, monotonous, yet strenuous work for three months at a stretch, in particular at a steady pace.”

However, foreign seasonal workers – formerly from Poland and now from Romania – are grateful for the work. They earn four to seven times more than at home – if they can even find a job there. “They all got a shock when the travel ban was imposed, since they had firmly reckoned on the income. They wrote to us every day.”

Trip to Romania

This close relationship has not come about by chance: Professional employment agencies used to arrange the seasonal workers for Wiebrechtshausen. However, trust in them has dwindled. “We learned, for example, that workers had to wait a long time to be paid, had to use the agencies’ bus company and also pay extra commission to them. We therefore made contact with the people directly in Romania.”

And so it came about that our employee Karina Poppe herself traveled to Romania at short notice in February. “She visited the family that has always come to work for us the last few years,” says Axel Altenweger. There were three of them last summer. Karina Poppe personally got to know all their relatives in a small village near Sibiu: several married couples, children, stepchildren, grandparents – shepherds, cooks and factory workers by trade. Without further ado, Karina Poppe asked all the relatives who could and wanted to work – including Maria-Ana, who then spent a summer in Wiebrechtshausen while her two-year-old daughter, whom she could see and speak with over the Internet every day, remained in Romania in the safe and caring hands of her grandparents.

At the end of the day, the close family relationship was a blessing in exceptional times: No coronavirus distancing rules applied among them because they all come from one family. And, as Axel Altenweger notes, the hygiene regulations for company lodgings – a maximum of two people to a room, no bunk beds and eight sanitizer dispensers – have always been far exceeded at the organic farm anyway.

“A good company”

The season workers are therefore also bright and cheery as they hoe the fields around Wiebrechtshausen and Einbeck. Camelia Roman, one of the few from the family who can speak a bit of German, says she would “like to come back next year” and calls the work “OK” and KWS “a good company” that is also well-known in Romania with its corn, sugarbeet, cereal, rapeseed and sunflower activities. She then continues hoeing; on other days, she does weeding – among the red beets, potatoes or carrots. Without the family’s help, says Axel Altenweger, “we would have had ten hectares less beet and the carrots would have been overgrown with weeds.”

Nevertheless, Axel Altenweger sometimes runs out of chores for them to do. “We don’t have work for them all the time.” But the Romanians were always asking for something to do. Altenweger, who hails from Munich, then consults on a day-to-day basis with Hendrik Jürgens, head of the Einbeck station, who assigns the temporary workers to the fields he is charge of, after which they return to the monastery estate in the evening. “There’s a sort of family feeling. You have to be there for the people and take care of them. Also when someone happens to get toothache.”

Everyone stayed healthy in this exceptional year. |