TALLINN - It's late morning on the Vacca dairy farm, just outside the central Estonian town of Turi. The real work is already done. Most of the herd, 450 cows in all, have been milked and are back in their shed doing what they do best 's chewing hay. After dealing with the mechanic about a broken water pipe, the farm's manager gives me a tour of the facility, a former Soviet collective that's being fixed up piece by piece. We squish our way down mucky corridors and he shows me the new wiring system that's recently been installed and the state-of-the-art milking equipment. Then there's one particularly special innovation, an electronic tagging system that lets him find and separate any animal that needs special attention.
The improvements, especially in animal health, he's made since he began working here a year ago have given him "a real sense of achievement." His voice rings with the same pride I find in other successful managers in this small, dynamic country. But this particular farm manager isn't the least bit Estonian. He's from Staffordshire and his name is Andy Hanmer.
Hanmer is one of a very select group of foreigners who make their living in Estonia by farming. The exact size of this group is unknown, but one insider says they number around 20. Italy, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, England and Germany are all represented, so to speak.
Some are just investors or owners, but others 's more than you might expect 's are donning overalls, rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves. There's a German woman, for example, who has been operating a horse farm in southern Estonia since 1994. And Tallinn barflies might be surprised to hear that Alan Gregory, best known as a founder of the popular Nimeta Bar, now runs a successful business farming worms for organic compost.
Fergus Stanley, General Manager and part owner of the Vacca farm where Hanmer works, is another hands-on type. Unlike the archetypal expatriate whose life consists of passing out business cards by day and hitting the clubs by night, he's often up early in the morning milking the cows and isn't afraid of getting his fingernails dirty.
Stanley arrived from his hometown of Kilkenny, Ireland a little over four years ago when soaring land rental prices made it impossible for him to eek out a living as a dairy farmer there.
"Basically I was farming in Ireland and seeing it going nowhere fast," he says. "You could work all of the hours God gave you, but …if you calculate the hours you work and what you actually got paid, it was minimal. You got paid something silly per hour."
In need of steady work, he answered an ad in an Irish farming paper and ended up managing a foreign-owned holding in Estonia. Once here, he saw opportunity and soon became an investor himself.
"Back four years ago there were thousands of hectares of land everywhere not being used," he says. "You could walk into any farm that was for sale and …you could think of a hundred different [ways] how, with the proper investment, you could get that farm into a money-making position."
In the end, that's just what he did. In the three years since he and his partners bought the 600-hectare Vacca farm, it has developed from 140 cows to 450 cows. Plans are underway to increase the herd by another 100 to 150 in the near future.
Expatriate farmers I spoke to were quick to say that managers from Western Europe don't possess any magic wands to lord over their Eastern European counterparts. Indeed Vacca farm's improvement follows a similar trend among successful Estonian-owned farms in the country.
Even Stanley, who has generation upon generation of farming in his blood, says there's not much he would do differently than an Estonian manager would.
"I'm more of a hands-on man than my [average] Estonian counterpart, but that's because I came from a family-oriented business," he says.
Other investors who have preceded him haven't always taken such a humble approach. The industry echoes with tales of failure by foreigners who came in mistaking Estonia for a bargain-basement country, or blindly assuming that their imported methods were universally transferable.
"That's one thing that foreigners always get wrong," says Stanley. "You can come to Estonia and think you know best about this, that and the other. …Okay, farming's farming wherever it is in the world, but there's a lot of things to take into account when you're farming over here."
There's the issue of division labor and other practical issues, but there's also the deeply emotional issue of land ownership to consider. Despite the fact that the amount of agricultural land under foreign ownership is tiny and strict laws are in place to prevent speculation, the idea of foreigners owning farms in this traditionally rural country still raises nationalist hackles.
"Different people have different emotions, don't they?" says Nevil Hewett who got into the trade as a sideline to his dairy production business. "I mean, some people will say, 'Estonian land is Estonian and it should be owned by Estonians, and what's a foreigner doing involved in farming?'"
By most accounts though, this kind of grumbling is minimal, and attitudes toward expatriate farmers are positive, particularly to those who make the effort to learn Estonian. If you want to survive, it's pretty much a necessity to know Estonian in these parts.
Stanley himself has been spending much less time on the farm lately, having handed over the day-to-day operations to Hanmer. But he says he still plans to keep a hand in Vacca farm, of which he remains a shareholder.
"It's the love of the land," Stanley says. "In Western Europe, people love land, love to walk on it and call it their own."
