Hi there!
Today I woke up with the sun tickling my nose. After breakfast I hoped on my bike and enjoyed 15 minutes ride to Alnarp campus between sun, fields with newly sawn cerials, colourful trees in red-yellow-green-brown-ish, and some birds picking seeds from the fields and twittering in the beautiful morning light. I just wanted to share that with you how beautiful Skåne with its spacious landscape can be. (But I promise: there is also heavy rain from the side sometimes – then you hate biking between the fields. :D)
Lets talk a bit about lectures. Today we have had some introduction in EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and its implementation in Sweden in general. That basic lecture in the morning was followed by a talk of a Swedish farmer from the region Jämtland far up north. Additionally to his full time job he is the head of the Swedish small scale farmers association, called “Nordbruk”. The farmer talked about the implementation of the agricultural policies and the issues that small scale farmers have with that. Especially up in the north. A famous Swedish saying that he told us is: the way to Stockholm is long, but it is even longer to Brussels. 😉 With that he was criticising the inaccessibility of EU-Policies for small scale farmers in the northern regions of Sweden. All in all we had a long day with controversial discussions and a lot of information to be digested further on.
When I biked back home on late afternoon the sun was doing me a favour again as she would like to compensate me for the long day in University. The flat landscape here in Skåne reminded me what the farmer in the lecture was showing us from his region up north in Jämtland. There the Swedish landscape is totally different from here with a lot of mountains, forests and lakes. For comparison here you have both, get an impression:
Enough for today, vi ses!
Ludwig