Flurbereinigung

Flurbereinigung is the German word used to describe land reforms in various countries, especially West Germany and Austria. The term can best be translated as land consolidation. Unlike the land reforms carried out in the socialist countries of the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany, the idea of Flurbereiningung was not so much to distribute large quasi-feudal holdings to the formerly landless rural workers and/or to Kolkhoz-style cooperatives, but rather to correct the situation where after centuries of equal division of the inheritance of small farmers among their heirs and unregulated sales, most farmers owned many small non-adjacent plots of land, making access and cultivation difficult and inefficient. Two other European countries where this kind of land reform has been carried out are France (remembrement) and the Netherlands (ruilverkaveling).

Although these reforms had been anticipated by agricultural planners since the beginning of the 19th century, they were not executed in grand scale until the time about 1950. These reforms sought to improve agricultural efficiency and support the infrastructure. Basis in Germany was a law passed in 1953 called ″Flurbereinigungsgesetz″, latest amendment from 1976. After criticism about loss of biodiversity caused by large-scale land reforms began to be voiced in the late 1970s, restoring the natural environment became another objective.

The process of Flurbereinigung was spurred heavily after the Second World War. In that time there was a great need for inexpensive agricultural products. At the same time the population in West Germany underwent a rapid increase caused by millions of refugees from the former eastern territories of Germany. The idea was first to restructure the land properties by amalgamating different fields under the same property that were formerly geographically dispersed, thus reducing labor and costs of cultivating those fields. As a second step, agricultural infrastructures like dirt roads and farming machinery were heavily improved. That process also included regulating streams and straightening country roads. As a result, the Flurbereinigung radically reshaped large areas of German agriculture, including the German wine industry. First taking shape in land consolidation legislation passed in the 1950s as part of an overhaul of the structuring of German agriculture, the Flurbereinigung would see many landscapes rearranged and physically reshaped, for example with respect to building access roads to make agriculture more effective.

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