Latvian folk song

Land and freedom

It is an early morning on Ataugas Farm. I awake under the wooden rafters of Aivars and Lilija Ansoni’s home and groggily make my way down the stairs, unsure what the day will bring. I arrived on the farm the evening before, having arranged to work in exchange for an account of Latvia’s organic farming movement from a couple who has been involved since its inception. Aivars is in the kitchen, frying eggs in a skillet. He adds a generous dollop of sour cream to the sizzling eggs then slides them onto a plate and hands the food to me, blue eyes twinkling. I inhale the rich aroma with surprised pleasure. Aivars laughs and tells me that this is one of the many benefits of being a farmer: ‘I have always loved sour cream on fried eggs,’ he says, ‘but it was too fattening to eat when I worked in the city. This will give you the energy to work hard today!’

The agrarian ideal runs deep in the Latvian national consciousness for, in this formerly colonized society, land is a potent symbol of cultural freedom. When Latvia first secured its independence from foreign rule in 1920, the young Republic immediately passed the Agrarian Reform Law. Transferring land ownership from the Baltic German nobility – who at the time were less than 4 per cent of the population – to Latvian peasants, the Republic abruptly dismantled a colonial production regime that had been in existence since the fourteenth century (Plakans, 1995). This act radically transformed the agrarian landscape, as large estates were carved into small-scale family farms. When Latvians again declared their independence in 1990, the transitional government re-enacted the agrarian reforms of the First Republic, encouraging a new generation of Latvians to return to the land and take up the national tradition of homesteading (Žakevičiūtė, 2016).