Hi r/germany!

I’m fascinated by the German countryside and recently captured this aerial shot. I noticed several remote houses with small patches of land. Are these typically farmhouses, and can the owners sustain a good living from such parcels of land? The efficiency and beauty of the landscape is remarkable and I’m curious about the stories behind it.

Danke schön for your insights!

by anotherbaby

7 comments

  1. Most of them have have sold their land or rent it out. These were separate farms in the past, but it’s not efficient anymore to run such a small farm these days.

    But yes, a lot of people I know that own these houses and the land around it are well off. At least in most of western Germany.

  2. These are or were farmhouses. How many of them are still used by farmers and how much land if the surrounding countryside belongs to each one is unclear. They wouldn’t be able to survive from farming only the land halfway between the houses.

    Typically only a few of these people are still in farming, and they bought the others land or are leasing it while the other ones only kept the building with maybe a little land surrounding it.

  3. How the land is structured varies between regions. There are areas where most farms are/used to be in villages, with few of them outside. There were periods of time where farmers were encouraged to move out of the village cores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aussiedlerhof

    That said, in either case most old farm buildings will no longer be inhabited by active farming families. Big farms now hold most of the land.

  4. they were farms once, many ihnerited them and then sold or rent out the properties they now no longer need to produce food and are now rich, often living off of “passive income”

  5. Horses are kept on some of them and some are used for regular business activity but most are still use for agricultural purposes. Especially those located in between the fields. If consider sweet Bauschheim and Astheim rural, you need to leave the Rhein-Neckar/Rhein-Main Area and see remote RLP or eastern Germany. There is still a true countryside 😀 (btw I live somewhere in this pic)

  6. That doesn’t look rural at all. But yes, those are farms.

  7. My parents own one such remote house but they aren’t farmers, they just like living in the countryside. Some of their “neighbors” aren’t farmers either, but some are. The farmers own or rent most of the land, the others own very little land (mostly just the ground the house stands on) and work in nearby towns

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