The Rohrbach location is secured, but losing day for the Bauernkammer is approaching

The closure of the Rohrbach District Chamber of Farmers was barely averted last year. Nevertheless, there is still a lottery day for the regional advice center in the next few days. “There will be changes. We will negotiate what these will look like in the next few days. We have presented a good concept,” says Martin Mairhofer, chairman of the Rohrbach District Chamber of Farmers. The numbers show how important a regional chamber is. Although the number of agricultural businesses in the district has been declining for several years, the number of advisory hours is still increasing. At the end of February there will be a groundbreaking discussion with the chamber management in Linz. Incidentally, the background to the closure plans was the Chamber of Agriculture’s budget concerns. The team of consultants led by department head Heribert Schlechtl provided around 15,000 hours of advice last year. Applications for funding services in particular generate a lot of advice: “If you forget a snag somewhere, you are foregoing benefits. The bureaucracy and complexity surrounding the applications is enormous,” says Mairhofer.

1823 companies applied

11,441 customer contacts were recorded in the previous year. 1,823 companies submitted multiple applications for compensation payments last year. This means that on average each farm manager had six contacts with the Rohrbach Chamber of Farmers. “On average, three of these were personal contacts and three were telephone contacts. So every farmer would have to travel to Linz three times if the location were to close,” calculates the BBK chairman. In some cases these would be distances of more than 85 kilometers. But it’s not just Rohrbach farmers who like to turn to their BBK. Many farmers from other districts also come to Rohrbach. They particularly appreciate the quality of the advice: “All of our consultants have an agricultural background or a home business themselves, so they know exactly what they are talking about.”

The 1,823 farmers in the Rohrbach district cultivate an average of 21 hectares. About 30 years ago there were twelve hectares per farm. The agricultural area has decreased by ten percent to around 38,800 hectares in the past 20 years. “But this is not solely due to land consumption. Many areas are simply no longer registered,” says Mairhofer.

Cattle farming is still a priority in the Rohrbach district, as the district belongs to the “Upper Austrian milk belt”. Around five percent of all milk in Austria is produced in Rohrbach: 1,214 farms keep a total of 66,400 cattle. The milk delivery volume has been increasing continuously for 20 years and was most recently at 164 million kilograms.

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