Gerold Rahmann

Gerold Rahmann  was born and grew up on a farm in East Frisia  in north-west Germany in 1962. He has studied agricultural economics at the University of Göttingen (Germany) until 1990 with the thesis about 'Dairy farming in Malawi', gained his PhD there in 1994 in the field of rural development with the dissertation about 'economic actions of nomads in Sudan in the case of droughts' and habilitated as an agricultural ecologist with the profile on 'Biotope man-agement as new function and production of animal husbandry' at the University of Kassel (Germany) in 1999 and became Professor at the faculty in 2006. In 2000, he was appointed founding director of the Federal Research Centre for Organic Agriculture, where he worked there until he retired. From 2015-2017 he took a sabbatical to work as program director for the German ministry of International Cooperation in the "OneWorld - NoHunger " Initiative in Ethiopia. He returned to his permanent position as director of the Thünen-Research Center for Organic Farming  (Germany)..

Photo 1: Gerold Rahmann from East Frisia: this lies in the northwest of Germany on the North Sea coast. It includes several North Sea islands. Today (2027) around 475,000 people of mostly Germanic origin (Chauken and Frisians) live on an area of around 3,144 km2, which corresponds to a population density of 150 people per km2 (Germany: 233, world: 60, Bangladesh: 1,265). The first traces of human settlement date back around 7,500 years and agriculture were already practiced here around 3,000 years ago. Even today, the landscape is still character-ized by agriculture. Around 3,000 farms mainly grow cereals on a third of the 200,000 hectares of agricultural land, mainly on the fertile marshy soils on the coast. Milk is mainly produced on the moorland inland. The Holstein-Friesian cow  is the most important dairy cow breed in the world and has its home here. Amerika', a small agricultural moorland colony in the municipality of Friedeburg , is also located here. Gerold Rahmann was born in 1962 on one of these dairy farms and grew up here. He walked by foot via 'Russia' (in German: Rußland) to school in Friedeburg, 4 km away.

Photo 2: Diploma thesis writing about and above cows, my first publication about "Dairy farm-ing in Malawi" on Alp Schlans, Switzerland. In the morning and evening, he milked the cows and cleaned the barn. This kind of work was often done in summer by German agricultural students: cheap, skilled, hard-working and motivated. During the day and in the evening, they typed on hay bales and manure planks in an improvised office on the barn floor above the dairy barn. The farmers were very skeptical about the computer and the printer in their barn. But what could they do?

Gerold has been involved with agriculture his entire life, both professionally and privately. The first time he travelled abroad was in 1979 when he was 17 years old in Czechoslovakia. At that time, this country was still part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Since then, he has travelled abroad more than 250 times. In total, more than 4500 days, i.e. more than 12 years, have not been spent in Germany. In these 50 years, the World of Food and Agriculture has changed con-siderably, both in practice and in its agro-ecological and socio-economic relations. When Gerold Rahmann was born, around 3 billion lived on the earth, today, 65 years later, are more than 8 billion alive, nearly 3 times more. All need enough, healthy and affordable food. His passion was, to find solutions with research and knowledge transfer for those global food challenges.

Gerold's publications you find here.

Gerold' paintings you an find here.

Gerold's novels you find here.

Gerold's travels you find here.