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| You are right when you say some of eastern europe is modernizing, in fact in certain places its comparable to north american agriculture. This is influenced greatly by foreign investment, absentee landowners and the like. Most of the rapid modernizing is taking place in places that are fairly rural, with large expanses of flat land. One of the things holding back more widespread modernizing besides the economics, is the fact that many farmers are exeriencing private ownership of land for the first time, and so are fiercely independant. 20 years ago when the communist regimes began to fail, the worker farmers abandoned the large collectives ( which by the way were models of large scale unproductivity ) taking small plots of land and animals to sustain themselves and have made a living this way since then, selling what little extra they have in the local towns. Larger farms were more a working arrangment by several farmers and often involve foreign money.
A large portion of lands in the eastern countries, have been farmed for years without chemicals and commercial fertilisers. I have spent a lot of time travelling throughout the area, Croatia, Albania, Czech republic, Poland, Ukraine, Repulic of Moldova, and Romania. I have seen the remains of the former large collectives, immense facilties designed to make work for as many people as possible with little to no modern technology. I visted many types of farms when there, I saw one milking parlor which was 20 years old and rusty but still in use, spent a week milkng cows by hand in the carpathian mountains, spent time with a shepherd and his family, its really a interesting place and in contrast to the rest of europe.
But like everywhere, the farmers face the realities that legislation is mainly comiong from the urban centers and they have to conform to the whims and wishes of the politician catering to the voters in the cities.
If you ever have a chance to travel in europe, especially eastern europe, its worth the time to go.
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Overseas Combines (rodaves post below)
