Agriculture

During our travels through the Franche-Comté region we saw lots of land with young crops - mainly cereals. Here is a picture of some canola growing in a field, and some silos (which I snapped through the windscreen as we drove past). There were hundreds of hectares of crops, but usually in small plots, with no fences - so I presume that these fields are continuously cropped.

Cows coming in for milking

The area is also famous for its cheeses, and both Stephan's and Annick's fathers had been cheese makers. There were many dairy farms. Most of the cows we saw were brown and white, a local breed called Montbéliard.
(Click here to find out more about the Montbéliard breed.)

Our hosts organised a visit to a dairy farm for us. The farm was only small, with about 30 or 40 cows being milked. The milk goes down the road about 5kms to a fromagerie where it is made into cheese.

The by-product of cheese-making is whey, and Annick works for a company that dries the whey into powder and exports it around the world. In her job distributing the products she speaks both English and German, as well as French, and she is currently learning another language (I can't remember if it was Polish or Russian). However Stephan only speaks French, so he and Roger (who only speaks English) had quite interesting chats!