This article is written from a completely amateur perspective and is probably hasty and unscientific in some of its conclusions. But perhaps there is something to be said for looking at the landscape with an unbiased eye and trying to read it.

When I more or less involuntarily had to get back on a plane in the spring of 2022, I made some observations from the air that fascinated me for days:
In spring, there is a balanced mixture of cultivated areas covered with vegetation and freshly plowed areas where the earth lies bare. With the distance of 8 to 10km to the ground and the right incidence of sunlight, large structures became visible in the earth that obviously had something to do with erosion, humus and moisture in the landscape. They did not seem to fit at all into the overlying grid of subdivided agricultural areas and fields. The landscape tells its story.


The pictures in this article were taken from the air over Serbia. The lower part of the top picture in particular raises so many questions for me!
At first I thought that perhaps the plexiglass window of the plane was causing these differences in color and brightness when backlit by the sun. But the spots remained attached to the landscape when I changed the camera position. So what I perceived really had to be on the ground down there.
But how is it that part of the landscape looks as if a huge scraper has scratched evenly across the landscape? The landscape seems to be very flat. So where do these ridges come from? Or are they just different moisture distributions reflecting the sun differently? Were there glaciers here too at some point in the past, as in northern Germany, which scraped across the land over the millennia? How old can these traces be? In this case, my imagination is not enough to come up with an explanation.

Farmers have of course known for a long time that soils can vary greatly in their composition and therefore fertility on the same field. As fertilizer is expensive, there is now modern technology that can apply fertilizer with pinpoint accuracy to very different sections of land using GPS coordinates.
Looking at this landscape, I (the amateur) ask myself whether it wouldn’t make more sense to divide the areas to be cultivated according to their natural soil conditions rather than according to a seemingly arbitrary geometric grid. Wouldn’t that lead to more homogeneous cultivation? In keyline design, for example, the geological contour lines are used to divide areas and sub-areas, thus slowing down the runoff of water and keeping it more evenly distributed over the three-dimensional landscape. But how can a divided and subdivided landscape like the one in the photos be completely reorganized after centuries of private ownership, and everybody voluntarily participates?

But back to the landscape from the plane: I find the tracks along the Tisa River near Batka no less impressive but easier to explain. It has its origins hundreds of kilometers further north-east in the Carpathians and forms the border between Romania and Ukraine for a while. As a mountain river, it will certainly discharge a lot of meltwater. The picture clearly shows how, over the years, the banks of the river at Batka have eroded further and further into the flat landscape as the water levels have risen and fallen. It is easy to count 50 rings, which certainly represent the course of the former river banks in the course of time. At some point, the route of the river changed radically, so that the decades-old bank rings at the bottom of the picture were cut diagonally by the new course. Presumably due to human activity, the river was later straightened at this point and the former Neander was turned into farmland.

If I look at the area from the photo from an even greater distance, for example using the satellite photos on Google Maps, then a whole mess of traces appears in the more extensive surrounding area, showing many more former river courses. Were these different rivers or has a single river shifted its course over such great distances through the landscape over the millennia? Are the lakes remnants of the river courses? What happens if we stop this landscape dynamic?
The consequences that river regulation can have on large rivers can be regularly observed in particularly affected watersheds in spring and during large-scale heavy rainfall events. Due to the limited volume of the straightened river courses, the buffering effect of the neander and floodplains is lost and the water expands into undesirable areas in other places. The swelling of the rivers is also exacerbated by the alteration of the buffering effect of the landscape, such as keeping the rubber layer free on agricultural land, because the water runs off faster as a result and is not held long enough in the landscape. The economic damage can run into the billions.
Dams are another example: Stones and pebbles are transported further and further downstream towards the sea. However, they do not get past the dam wall. So they accumulate at the bottom of the reservoirs. Every year a little more sediment layer at the bottom and a little less water in the reservoir above.

Meanwhile, I notice the differences in the ground even from the tour bus. Especially in large uncultivated areas like the one in the picture above. With growing experience, the soil differences can also be assumed and read beneath or with the help of vegetation. And that’s how I continue to learn from year to year…

Matthias Fritsch is part of the core team of the forest garden in Rehfelde. For professional and private reasons, he is regularly on the road with the European long-distance bus network between Berlin and Athens & as a filmmaker documents phenomena related to climate change. As a freelance artist he develops his own solutions and routines for a resource-saving everyday life. In Rehfelde he initiated e.g. the experimental gardens, the shade tree nursery and the seedlings forest.