Open cattle stable

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Open cattle stable in Tornow, Neuruppin district

The open cattle stable is a roofed and - in the original sense - only provided with a protective wall on the weather side for free-range keeping (with free access to watering and feeding place) of cattle.

history

Today, open stables are almost exclusively associated with agriculture in the GDR . In fact, this type of construction, mostly as a grazing animal shelter to protect against precipitation or solar radiation, is widespread outdoors, but only seasonally and not for year-round housing. For year-round keeping, they are only suitable in regions with a suitable climate or for resistant cattle breeds; this was also based on good experiences in climatically favorable regions of the Soviet Union , which the GDR referred to in the 1950s. Corresponding investigations were also carried out at the Institute for Animal Breeding of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in the early 1950s .

Open cattle stables in the GDR

The propagation of open stalls at the end of the 1950s

The cattle open stall was a requirement of the 33rd plenary session of the Central Committee of the SED (16 to 19 October 1957), in which in the Agricultural Production Cooperatives ( LPG federated) farmers as part of the socialist transformation of agriculture were instructed to open stables for rearing cattle to to achieve the goal of the second five-year plan for agriculture, namely "increasing the yields of animal production and further improving the supply of the population from their own resources". As a result of a related lecture by Walter Ulbricht , this type of cattle farming was stylized as a socialist achievement, the implementation of which should be an indispensable prerequisite for the way out of the supply shortage at the time. A legal basis for this was created in the “Law on the Second Five-Year Plan for the Development of the National Economy in the GDR”; on the part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (Minister Hans Reichelt , Democratic Peasant Party of Germany (DBP)) “Instructions for the establishment of dairy cattle stalls” were drawn up and published.

There were several reasons for the propagation of the open cattle stalls:

  1. An improvement in the tense supply situation that had already arisen as a result of the land reform in the Soviet occupation zone in 1945/1946.
  2. The amalgamation of the dairy herds away from the individual farms in central systems would lead to a more rational management, since after the departure of many farming families to the west in the course of the collectivization of agriculture, an acute labor shortage had arisen. It was planned that by 1960 70 percent of the approximately 442,000 dairy cows in the GDR should be housed in central stalls. “The working individual farmer has to spend an average of 40 minutes a day to feed, clear and milk a cow. This difference between eleven and forty minutes makes up 17 whole working days in a year. If one uses 1.50 marks for the value of an hour of work  , the individual farmer uses 261 marks per animal per year. "
  3. Compared to traditional closed stables, according to a calculation, 66 percent of the construction costs and thus also the corresponding building material could be saved.

The stables required for this would have been around 650 million MDN (Mark of the German Central Bank ) in traditional, closed construction ; 217 million MDN were estimated for the open stables. The following savings were calculated for the individual material items:

and display information about the image
Original caption: Life has also changed fundamentally in the village of Gutenberg, Halle district. Farmers, gardeners and farm workers have joined forces to form an agricultural production cooperative and have gone over to socialist large-scale production in agriculture, which opens up all production and labor reserves through the use of more highly developed technology. During a long break, the schoolchildren visit “their” cattle barn. The old teacher explains the advantages of keeping cattle in the open to his young colleague, who has just started her practice. The little ones listen carefully to what their old teacher says.

Resistances

The construction of the open stables initially met with fierce resistance. The reasons for this were:

  1. In the absence of clear descriptions, one simply had no idea what that meant. In the Schweriner Volkszeitung , a comrade Tesch, first secretary of the works party organization in the Wittenberg sewing machine factory , complained : "Only we should at least know from the drawing what such a stable actually looks like."
  2. A designation of correspondingly large areas became necessary and with it a loss of arable and grazing land.
  3. Sufficient workers were often not available to build the buildings, as in the course of the forced collectivization of agriculture many farming families had left their farms to the west.

In the Schwerin district, aid contracts were concluded between the companies and their sponsored LPGs . For example, workers at the Schwerin Klement-Gottwald works built an open stable for their sponsored farmers in Leezen . Railway workers, railway policemen, young people, soldiers and even members of a Soviet troop unit also lined up. "For the preparation of the roof structure, it is planned to involve comrades of the combat group ," reported the Schweriner Volkszeitung. There was also common sense, which could not be brought into harmony with the ideas of the party secretaries, who were often inexperienced in agriculture, but could quickly be seen as a boycott of the construction of socialism; LPG chairmen unwilling to build were relieved of their posts.

The open cattle stable that can be "completed"

Management errors and a lack of experience in the operation of an open stable resulted in a variety of problems in the harsh climate between the Baltic Sea and the Ore Mountains compared to the warm regions of the Soviet Union. The lack of acceptance of the LPG workers, who themselves suffered from the outside temperatures, also meant that milk yields fell rapidly in the winter months and some young cattle froze to death. It was difficult to clean the stalls on the frozen ground, the cattle stumbled over frozen cow dung or slipped on frozen liquid manure. The livestock was decimated by emergency slaughter.

During a scientific conference of the German Academy for Agriculture in Leipzig on the subject of “open stalls”, specific figures were given: 720 cattle died every day.

In 1958 the first open stable and some wooden pig houses were built. Due to our climatic conditions, however, it became necessary to convert the open stable into a closed stable in 1959 .

Since people were reluctant to row back, the magic formula was now: Completion of open cattle stalls - for stables in large block and concrete element construction, even kits for side and front walls with windows were offered in the 1960s.

status quo

The following important information is missing from this article or section:
In the dairy cattle sector, too, barns that are open on at least one side have been built in recent years
Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

In the field of organic agriculture , in recent years, cattle and pigs have returned to open stalls on a smaller scale . It is important to select breeds that are appropriately resistant, but - in contrast to high-performance breeds in extensive livestock farming - have a lower milk yield or slaughter weight. The open stable is also suitable for horses .

literature

  • Arnd Bauerkämper : Forced modernization and crisis cycles. Land reform and collectivization in Brandenburg from 1945 to 1960/61. In: History and Society. Volume 25, No. 4, East Germany under Communism 1945–1950. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Berlin 1999, ISSN  0340-613X , pp. 556-588.
  • Lothar Hussel: Our open cattle stable. Deutscher Bauernverlag, Leipzig 1959.
  • Lothar Hussel, Walter Schindler: Completion of open cattle stalls. German Agricultural Publishing House, Leipzig 1962.
  • Manfred Teresiak: Marzahn becomes a fully cooperative. The LPG “New Order” in its founding years . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 3, 2001, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 170-175 ( luise-berlin.de ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ F. Weber: Comparative climatological and physiological studies on cattle in an open stable and in a stable of conventional design. In: Zeitschrift für Tierzüchtung und Züchtungsbiologie , Edition 64, 1955, pp. 1-24.
  2. ↑ a b c The stable is open . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 1958 ( online ).
  3. ↑ January 26, 1961. In: Chronicle of the Wall. Online at Chronik-der-Mauer.de, accessed on January 6, 2017.
  4. ↑ Development of the agricultural production cooperative. In: Agriculture. Steinigtwolmsdorf Community, online at Steinigtwolmsdorf.com, accessed on January 6, 2017.