History of Swabian stone fields
The stony fields were and are a characteristic of the Swabian Alb .
The soil above the limestone (mostly White Jura ) is barren. Soil formation over limestone rock is a slow process. In the past 24 million years ( Young Tertiary and Pleistocene ), climatic factors on the Alb have repeatedly eroded soils suitable for arable farming . Productive soils, nutrient-rich loose sediments and colluvia collected in deeper sections of the alpine relief: in hollows, dry valleys and floodplains.
With the population growth in the late Middle Ages , more forests were cleared and less profitable areas were turned into arable land.
In the fields, especially on the plateaus, limestone splintered from the rock keeps coming to the surface. The phenomenon is more pronounced nowadays when steel and technology are used to plow deeper. Frequent changes in frost also bring stones to the surface again and again through freezing and frost lift. In pre-industrial times, sufficient field yields were hardly possible without stone harvesting and laborious manual labor.
With the modernization of agriculture since the 18th century, especially after the Second World War, marginally profitable agriculture was given up. Pioneering plants first grew on the reading stones, which had been piled up or strung in bars over centuries; later so much soil accumulated that the diverse vegetation developed into hedges . In the course of land consolidation and technical large-scale management, hedges were mostly leveled. Today, obstructive stones are mostly disposed of. Hedges can still be seen here and there on sloping or not intensively cultivated areas. The stone bars and hedges that have not yet been removed are seen today as important biotopes , as species-rich retreats for small animals. In individual cases they are protected by nature conservation law.
Climate, relief and vegetation
At the bottoming out are always the factors parent rock, climate , gravity and (geology) relief , vegetation and living beings, long-term acting soil erosion and weathering processes involved. On the parent rock, limestone (limestone layers are predominant in southwest Germany on the Swabian Alb, the Franconian Alb and the Muschelkalk areas between the Black Forest Wutach and the Main) , soil developed anew, but extremely slowly, in the late Pleistocene , after the last Ice Age .
The variety of soils is greater on the Eastern Alb and the so-called surface Alb, the Alb part south of the so-called Klifflinie ; from shallow borderline to profoundly fertile. On a large part of the north-east Alb, the White Jurassic rocks (silica limestone) are partially relocated and weathered to form flint loam. The Alb is partly covered from the south by the debris of the tertiary molasse and in its eastern part by loess .
Soils lie on loosened limestone chunks or calcareous solid rock, on which either bushes , forests and grasses thrive, or arable crops are laboriously achieved. Rendzina soils dominate here (in Polish, Rendzina means "rustling stones on the plow - a characteristic sound that occurs when working on the only slightly thick humus soils on limestone"). On knolls, plateaus and steep slopes, these soils are mostly particularly shallow.
Where denudation (changes in relief mainly due to precipitation-related erosion) has washed soils into valleys, in valleys that today often became dry valleys due to deep karstification , there are colluvia . These are nutrient-rich soil accumulations ( loose sediments ), which can have greater thickness, provided they have not been washed away by water . Thicker soils can also have formed in erosion-protected planes, hollows and saddle locations, on gentle slopes and in karst crevices. At such locations, soils could develop into terra fusca or even deep loam soils ( parabroun earths ). Most likely here the soils mixed with weathering phenomena of the limestone such as marl and clay . In some areas there was also a mixture with more or less thick layers of loess. In such soils, in addition to the topsoil (Ah soil horizon ), a subsoil (B horizon) has also developed, so there are transitions to the brown earth . In such cases, the calcareous initial situation ensures that soils are strongly biologically revitalized (relatively high soil pH ).
The denudation rates of the Swabian Alb of approx. 10 - 26 mm / ka (ka = thousand years) have largely destroyed the Tertiary and Pleistocene soil formations, although in large periods of the Tertiary in southwest Germany there were even very warm and very humid climates that were too lush with vegetation and bottoming out. The soils found today only had to develop again due to physical, chemical and biological weathering practically after the last ice ages ( glacials and periglacials ), especially in the warm periods .
"It is assumed that during the main formation period (the Rendzina soils) in the last 10,000 years, around 40 cm of limestone was dissolved, leaving a solution residue of only a few cm." Acid seepage water has weathered the limestone. The soil that formed was gradually decarbonised, which could lead to carbonate-free soils. The vegetation made the soil humus. Undemanding vegetation was often only gradually able to settle on solid parent rock.
Demographic Developments in Southwest Germany
The Swabian Alb was completely forested before settlement. The “natural forest communities were (...) dominated by an intolerant beech compared to the other deciduous tree species ( maple , ash , oak , etc.) . Thanks to its ability to gain a foothold in even the deepest shade from the age of the seedlings onwards, the beech was able to establish itself in almost all locations. During the first relatively early settlement, the forest was cleared by slash and burn in the most fertile locations . In Germany, the proportion of forests in the total area shrank to less than a fifth by around 1300.
As the population grew, others, u. U. less fertile, sites converted to arable land. The cattle were driven into cleared forests ( hat forests ). In the Middle Ages , the extensive plague epidemics around 1350 led to large-scale devastation . “Instead of 170,000 settlements that existed around 1300, 100 years later there were just 130,000.” Around 1450, around 40% of the total area of Germany was again forested. Wars, famines and epidemics devastated and depopulated entire regions. In parts of southern Germany, for example, only a third of the population survived. It took more than a century to recover from this. "As soon as the population grew again in the 16th century, the utilized arable land was expanded." (The so-called hut forests were also used. These are the light to almost open, park-like forests up to tree-lined pastures, into which, with the permission of (mostly aristocratic) forest owners the cattle were driven for the purpose of foraging.) The growing population density also made land grabbing on barren plateaus necessary.
Three-field economy
The three-field system was for the farmers from the 11th to mid-19th century, the only form of existence of their state . All fields had their prescribed function and layout. This created secure ownership , because the common division of real estate among all descendants of a peasant family entitled to inherit in southwest Germany, thus also on the Alb, worked within the three-field borders. The fields, which are small by today's standards, were always carefully cleared of stones. These were collected as stone bars at the edge of the field . The stone bars and the hedges growing on them also marked the property rights.
Because of the hardship involved in cultivating a field in the Middle Ages, it was common to divide the areas close to the respective village. Severity, engaging in ownership, rules of the corridor forced as an integral part of the three-field could transport routes and Zugtier - plow minimize -Consult. The real division counteracted a hierarchization of the peasant class in a certain way. As a result, property became smaller and smaller, and the fields often took the form of long, narrow strips.
With a rapidly growing population of a village, hard-to-work soil from the common land , such as newly cleared forest or sloping areas, had to be included in the three-field economy as Zelgen , or small pieces of land for particularly poor farmers were outsourced from the common land as "bycatch". Poor harvests , high taxes and compulsory labor quickly created bitter poverty in the already underprivileged farming class. The peasant revolts and wars of the late Middle Ages , the Thirty Years' War and later emigrations out of sheer necessity also bear witness to this .
The harsh climate on the plateaus, strict workload, stony soil, marginal yields, only a few tools that were not very resistant, were only enough for a meager existence. Long transport routes were out of the question; Draft animals, indispensable for plowing and transport, could not be kept by the poorer small farmers themselves; they had to commission the camper services from the richer farmers for work or payment.
The names of tubs and corridors, which at that time had great economic and legal significance, have in many cases been preserved in southwest Germany to this day, as can also be seen on the official topography maps. "Rauhe Äcker" and "Kalkecker" were exactly what the name implies. The “ Egert ” was the particularly low-yield, stony field that was left fallow for one or more years between the use of the fields and only grazed. In the case of the “Schenkeläckern”, the “Hakenacker” and the “Krummen Äckern”, the unfavorable shape and location had made the field work even more difficult. Very unfavorable soil, location in the shade of the nearby forest and a long distance from the farm were called “Waldäcker”, “Reute” or “Reutäcker”.
Pastor Nördlinger wrote about Tailfingen in 1718: “Life in a farming village in the Swabian Alb was characterized by barren soils and a rough climate. The place is small and wretched between the mountains, the summers are short, the winters long. The fields are stony and barren, the harvest is small ... The rich are very few, in fact the rich are also poor. "
It is noteworthy that the part of the name “Stein”, “Steinberg”, “Steinacker” appears in the names for vineyards and vineyards up to the present day . Their locations are mainly on chalky soils ( shell limestone and Keuper marl ), but not on the Swabian Alb and rather seldom on their foreland areas. The soils for viticulture may be stony, but not shallow and deeply weathered, without a good water balance (living beings), poor in nutrients and minerals , without sufficient solar radiation and a balanced microclimate near the water.
Stone harvest
The annual maintenance of the soil by reading the small and large stones was absolutely necessary to secure an adequate yield. The manual labor was affordable if the stones were stacked on the edge of the field (roadside) or the respective field edge, often on the property-marking parcel boundary . Over the years or generations, hedges grew on the piled reading stones. In sloping terrain, these contributed to the formation of terraces, which counteracted runoff and also provided protection against wind erosion, cold air currents or cattle represented. The wood of the hedges could be used as fuel in the farm with long-term care (keeping it open by burning it down or cutting it back, putting it on the stick ) . The hedges can be described as permanent anthropogenic succession areas. Over time, accumulated reading stones are populated by a great variety of cultural followers , both flora and fauna . Cold- blooded animals prefer to settle between the stones . The shrub plants that settle there are for animal protection and a source of food .
Steinacker
Where the Rendzina soil was particularly shallow, the fields were always more or less strewn with stones. When plowing with wooden plows and even more when using the harder iron plows, one could hear “the rustling of the plow in the ground” on the “broken plows”. The vernacular said it drastically: “Here the farmer plows on the devil's skull.” So the stone harvest was not only recommended to achieve better yields; most of the rocks were hard and often sharp-edged. They were wearing the plows. The larger stones, which are often found, even damaged them. In the 9th stanza of the approx. 200 year old rag song ' Siege of Munderkingen ', which is traced back to a Swabian homeland poet , it says: “If oiner a stoinigs Äckerle hot ond au an stompfe Pfluag and au a reidig's wife away, no hot he z ' scratches gnuag. "( Carl Borromäus Weitzmann )
The natural phenomenon that fields and pastures are repeatedly littered with limestone on the surface is still not recognized as a typically temperature-dependent, physical phenomenon. However, depending on the frequency of frost changes , stones hidden in the ground, especially small to medium-sized stones, are repeatedly transported to the surface of the earth by freezing and frost lift . The “Frost Hypothesis” was first described and published as a physical phenomenon by the Swedish scientist Beskow in 1930.
Technological farming and land consolidation
In the middle of the 18th century, the three-field economy gradually began to be overcome and the era of modern agriculture began. One began to give up or convert fields that could only be cultivated with a lot of manual labor or marginal yield. Pastures, meadows and orchards were created close to the village, and forests and fallow land further away . Because of the large number of areas now open, sheep farming expanded . Dry, nutrient-poor areas could develop into (semi) dry grasslands or lime grasslands .
The soil fertility could be increased, e.g. B. by new or additional fruits, fodder cultivation , fertilizing under plowing of fruits, variable, the local conditions adapted, crop rotations and changes. Also, fertilizer , pesticides , findings by analyzing soil and yield, enabled earnings.
The mechanization and mechanization of agriculture in the 20th century, the abandonment of marginal yield areas, the rural exodus , the scientific research of agricultural resources and methods, and finally also the rapid motorization in animal husbandry and in field cultivation and harvest, ensured a further boost in yield increases.
The use of better and better steel and corresponding plowing equipment and also the cultivation of the fields with more and more versatile and more powerful tractors has also led to the plowing depth being increased.
Deeper plowing "also led to a disproportionate increase in the accumulation of stones." On the shallow plateaus of the "rough" Alb, stony fields are still a common occurrence at the moment: "The Alb isch full of schoiner on boulders where there is more Deifel schmeißa ka ..." The Oral questioning of a Laichingen agricultural foreman in May 2016 revealed: “I sometimes do without plowing, especially with shallow Rendzina, and instead only use a suitable harrow . We only remove very large limestones beforehand and bring them to the stone-picking stations near Laichingen in the front-loading tractor . "
After the Second World War, land consolidation (“land order procedure”) was the most important instrument for modernizing agriculture. This should reorganize the agricultural and forestry property, the settlement structures and the traffic planning, also with the aim of enabling large-scale tillage . Hedges, whether growing on stone bars or not, and stone bars were then only in the way. A great many stone bars, hedges and arable terraces were leveled. Except as protection against erosion and in difficult relief, they were only preserved in the forest, or occasionally between fields. "On the Alb plateau, stone bars in the middle of the forest, such as at Ebingen on the Malesfelsen, can point to former arable farming on stock fields."
Today, sheep grazing - mainly because it is no longer profitable - has declined to such an extent that public and private Baden-Württemberg are concerned about how highly attractive landscapes can be preserved: beech forest, juniper heath , orchard meadow, which are still cultivated in large numbers Arable land, the rural settlement of the Swabian Alb. Were set up protected areas , habitats , natural monuments , habitats , species-rich habitat for partly by the extinction of endangered flora and fauna.
biodiversity
Small-scale cultural landscapes , structured by orchards, forest areas and hedges in a thousand-year-old rural tradition, divide the landscape into tangible units, which is perceived as pleasant and strengthens environmental awareness . "Boschen" and hedges made of deciduous trees that needed light settled on the stone bars and piles. "They form the classic biotope."
The huge, mostly economic restructuring in settlement and population only give agriculture in the Swabian Alb one chance of survival through consistent, ultra-modern, cost-intensive technology. However, this is often diametrically opposed to nature conservation and the care of biotopes. “The current conflict of interest between state-of-the-art agriculture and nature conservation mainly affects the shallow, often sunny locations on the Kuppenalb, whose economic performance is naturally more limited anyway. The ecologically particularly valuable biotopes are concentrated here. ”The survival of the historically grown cultural landscape of the Alb can only be achieved through sustainable care, biotope and species protection and through regulation of market forces. It is important to avoid leaving only museum evidence of the past - isolated islands - instead of biotope networks.
literature
- W. Rosendahl, B. Junker, A. Megerle, J. Vogt, (Ed.): Walks in the earth history. Part 18: Swabian Alb. 2nd Edition. Friedrich Pfeil Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-89937-065-2 .
- R. Engemann, J. Marx, M. Reinelt: Small structure analysis in the Altlandkreis Hersbruck. Unpublished report on behalf of the Bund Naturschutz in Bayern, Nuremberg 2009.
- Günter Künkele: Stony paradise, fascinating habitats in the Swabian Alb. Silberburg Verlag, Bebenhausen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8425-1138-5 .
- R. Enkelmann, D. Ruoff, W. Wohnhas: In the heart of the Alb. Nature and culture in the biosphere area. Silberburg Verlag, Bebenhausen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8425-1381-5 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ OF Geyer, MP Gwinner: Geology of Baden-Württemberg. 5th, completely revised edition. E. Schwizerbart'sche Verlag Buchhandlung, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-510-65267-9 , p. 323.
- ↑ Rendzina - Label Lime, on www.bodenwelten.de, published by the Bundesverband Boden eV
- ↑ a b Environment theme park Baden-Württemberg: Typical soils of the Swabian Alb. 2004. (themenpark-umwelt.baden-wuerttemberg.de)
- ^ Thekla Abel: Investigations into the genesis of the Malmkarst of the Middle Swabian Alb in the Quaternary and later Tertiary. Dissertation. Tübingen 2003, DNB 967386950 , p. 123. Water and wind erosion. Tend to be less with forest cover.
- ↑ a b c City of Münsingen (Ed.): Münsingen. History, landscape, culture. Festschrift for the 500th anniversary of the Münsinger Treaty of 1482. Thorbecke Verlag, Sigmaringen 1982, ISBN 3-7995-4046-6 , pp. 549, 550, 555.
- ↑ a b J. Eberle, B. Eitel, D. Blümel, P. Wittmann: Germany's South from the Middle Ages to the present. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg u. a. 2007, ISBN 978-3-8274-2594-2 , p. 157.
- ↑ a b Klaus Herrmann: There were stones and little bread - An agricultural historical stone harvest. In: Church in Rural Areas. 62 (3), pp. 22-30. (Reading sample online)
- ↑ This applies to the Swabian and Franconian Alb: Bund Naturschutz, Kreisgruppe Nürnberger Land: Project 502, 2009: Determination of small-scale landscape areas in the Altlandkreis Hersbruck. Winkelhaid 2016. (nuernberger-land.bund-naturschutz.de)
- ↑ Jiří Hönes: Field names lexicon for Baden-Württemberg. Version 1.0. Stuttgart-Untertürkheim 2011. (PDF on Wikimedia Commons)
- ↑ F. Scheerer: Field names of clearing. Balingen, July 10, 1972, p. 1333.
- ^ F. Weller: The East Alb - a rich archive of landscape history. Swabian Heimatbund, Stuttgart 2011.
- ^ Carl B. Weitzmann: Collected works. (Reprint of the Ludwigsburg 1829 edition, with additions from the 1803 and 1853 editions). City of Munderkingen (Hrgb). Süddeutsche VG, Ulm 1992. On the occasion of the 1200th anniversary of Munderkingen in 1992, the city reissued the works of the local poet Carl Borromäus Weitzmann (1767–1829).
- ^ Gunnar Beskow (translated by JO Osterberg): Soil Freezing and Frost Heaving with Special Applications to Roads and Railroads. Technological Institute, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. 1947 (in the Orig. Swedish Geological Society, ser. C, no. 375, 26th year book, no. 3.)
- ↑ Bund Naturschutz, Kreisgruppe Nürnberger Land: Characteristics, importance, endangerment and care of hedges. Winkelhaid 2016. (PDF)
- ^ H. Pfisterer: Äcker uff am alde Meer. 1st edition. Tübingen 2008, p. 36.
- ↑ Stone reading areas are actively used on the Alb. In: Südwestpresse Ulm. Lokales, Alb / Donau, August 27, 2015, accessed on October 11, 2016.
- ↑ F. Scheerer: Field names of clearing. Balingen, July 10, 1972, p. 893.