Blogging
From Abroad

Hey folks! After a month blogging for the WVU I think it’s time to introduce my self a little bit more thoroughly. As you maybe know from my profile, I am a Wood Science major at the BOKU, the University for Natural Resources and Applied Life Science in Vienna. But I grew up in another federal state, in Salzburg. The capital of Salzburg, which is the City of Salzburg, is btw the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And if you ever saw “The Sound of Music”, you might have a pretty good image about the landscape in my home-state.

I grew up on a farm in the small city of Seekirchen in Austria. In the course of time we had a pretty big assortment of different kind of livestock. When I was a small boy we had an average dairy farm with about 20 cows and about 23ha acreage. And, yes, this was an average farm. You see, our rural structures are much smaller. They are older, too. Our old farmhouse had an estimated age of 350 years. And it was constructed completely out of wood. But now we live in a new house with even floors :) The city of Seekirchen, actually, is the oldest in Austria. The first records are dated in the year 696 AC.

However, it became harder and harder to feed a family (I have 3 siblings) with the traditional kind of farming so my parents decided to start direct marketing and diversifying our range of products. Over the intervening years we kept different kinds of poultry (turkey, laying hens, guinea fowls and broilers), goats, sheep and pigs. And we managed to run our farm organically. Eventually my parents focused on dairy goats and right now we have the biggest goat farm in Salzburg, producing goat milk, cheese and other milk products like curd and yoghurt. If anybody is interested to learn more, you are invited to visit our webpage www.huttern.at. It’s in German, though.

Okay, so you know now a little bit about our farm. Let’s broaden the focus and have glimpse at the state of Salzburg. Here is the according wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salzburg_(state). The landscape is characterized by high alpine mountains (up to 10,000 feet) in the south and smooth countryside with lakes in the north (that’s where I live). To get an impression I post some pictures. Some of them were made during my favourite pastime activity: paragliding.

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If you ever think about visiting Europe, put Salzburg on the list of places to visit. Belive me, you won’t regret it!