Gurkenflieger

due to the highly industrialized agriculture around the town where i grew up, almost all the flat land there is covered with plastic film for long periods the year. maybe because of that hidden landscape and because i don’t care about agriculture, i never really noticed the gurkenfliegers, a frequent species of harvesters, especially in lower bavaria, used for the cultivation of gherkins.

gurkenfliegers (flieger is german for plane, gurke means gherkin) do have two wings, just like planes, where around ten people each side are placed on the abdomen, narrow to the ground, so that they can pick the gherkins and put them on a conveyor belt in front of them.

bavarians are rarely seen doing this skin job. their role is the role of the plantation’s owner. hundreds of years they exploited the advantage of being born in the valley of the river danube with its fertile soil. an advantage over those who were born north of the river in the stony bavarian forest. men from the forest had to work for the farmers in the valley (more entrepreneurs than farmers) and left the woman and children behind on their own poor farms.

when the people north of the river started to go further south to work for the bayrische motorenwerke (bmw), italians, yugoslavians and portuguese had to take over the empty workstations on the gurkenflieger, which in turn were replaced by polish, romanians, and still later by white-russians, ukainians and people in front of and behind the ural mountains.

when the farmers, entrepreneurs respectively, from the south of the danube, move out of their traditional farmhouses, they build new one, twice or three times as big, right next to the old one. kind as they are, they leave the old houses to the gurkenflieger-people. sometimes they have to add some containers from construction sites because the old houses are too small. portable toilets are usual.

often a shuttle service is offered from the residence to the gurkenflieger, mainly in the form of a old public transport bus (not infrequently without registration because for kilometers they never leave the property), sometimes constructions trailers are stretched behind the tractor, a hole was punched in the trailer and you can see the gurkenflieger-people smile happily through this little window, in anticipation of their fulfilling job.

see the gurkenflieger from 1:30…

(pic: von High Contrast (Eigenes Werk) [CC-BY-3.0-de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons)