The Raschbrunnenhof is located just outside the small Swabian community of Haunsheim on the edge of the Danube valley, surrounded by greenery.
When grandma and grandpa moved to the newly built Aussiedlerhof in 1967, there were still dairy cows, cattle, chickens and broilers as well as ducks and geese living with them on the farm. In the 1980s, dairy farming was abandoned in favor of beef fattening and from 2010 the farm was run without livestock.
In 2020, the farm was passed on to the third generation and converted to organic farming in accordance with Naturland guidelines. At the end of many renovation and renewal works, six
vacation apartments were built from an old feed store in 2022/23, giving the farm a new direction.
Incidentally, the name Raschbrunnenhof comes from old cadastral maps, where the location of the farm was referred to as ‘Am Raschbrunnen’.
For us, cultivating land is a great responsibility, as careless handling can cause long-term damage to the soil.
Aware of this responsibility, we rely on three basic principles:
Since 2022, the cultivation of organic vegetables has also been part of the Raschbrunnenhof. On a small area directly on the farm, around 10-15 different types of vegetables are grown extensively in open fields and foil tunnels. What does extensive mean to us?
Many crops, such as carrots, are largely left to their own devices. They have to manage without additional fertilizer and irrigation. Although this does not produce top yields, it saves a lot of resources and the taste is more intense. Fruit vegetables such as tomatoes are home-grown and we mainly grow seed-resistant varieties. Many work steps are carried out by hand, with tractors only being used to prepare the field.
From June to September we sell freshly harvested from the field (current information always on our Instagram profile) or at any time at Elisabeth in the Sonnenladen Gundelfingen and the Bertelemühle Günzburg during the respective opening hours.
Location: approx. 415m above sea level.
Area: approx. 70 hectares
Soils: variably good, 35 – 80 soil points
Distribution: approx. 65ha arable land, 5ha grassland
Crops: winter wheat, spelt, rye, soybeans, field beans, chickpeas, oats, sugar beet, grain maize, barley, rapeseed, peas and clover grass in approx. 6 to 7-year crop rotation
Organic farming means not only dispensing with pesticides and mineral fertilizers, but also completely changing the work steps, crop rotation and machinery.
What used to be three crops – maize, wheat and sugar beet – has now become 8-10 crops: winter wheat, spring wheat, spelt, oats, soybeans, field beans, peas, barley, rapeseed, chickpeas, sugar beet, grain maize, rye and clover grass have grown in our fields over the last two years and this diversity is good for the soil.
Flowering crops such as oilseed rape and beans attract bees and insects, while clover grass provides food for deer and hares.
Different crop requirements in terms of nutrients, water supply and soil ensure a balanced and healthy arable soil. While legumes can accumulate nitrogen from the air in the soil, cereals are happy to receive it the following year. A little horse manure is added to the sugar beet so that the potassium contained in the salvaged straw is returned to the land.
Creating and promoting these and other cycles is the task and goal of our work.
When it comes to machinery, we value the latest technology such as tractors with RTK – steering support using satellites – to prevent overlapping operations or our Farmdroid field robot. The autonomous self-propelled robot is currently responsible for sowing and regulating weeds in our sugar beet and rapeseed. It is constantly supplied with solar energy via PV modules and two batteries, thus saving the use of fossil fuels. It also protects our soil with its very low weight of just 900 kg.
At the moment, our farm cats and the occasional mouse are the only animals on the farm. The henhouse and run for the chickens are currently being built and in the future a few goats, ponies, rabbits and ducks will also have a home with us.