Germany has been a place of wonderful people, wonderful beer, terrific food, fast autobahns, apples trees and no small amount of difficulty understanding people. However, being here has meant I am now disappointed in how little we learn of other languages in Australia. I know we don’t need to, but to speak to almost any German and find they can make themselves understood in English, and French and sometimes a couple of other languages, shows how much we could do. While German is not a simple language, the similarities with English have meant I have been able to pick up enough to make some mistakes to laugh about.

I have been staying with Heike Feiler and her family in a town in southern Germany called Goippingen - I can’t even pronounce it, let alone spell it. Her father Horst is a mechanical engineer who is designing a new style of cotton spinning mill and weaver that is quite advanced. Heike is a nutritional scientist and has been applying for jobs after being in Australia for the last 7 months. She has also been my translator for the last couple of weeks which has been fantastic.

The first contact was a German dairy farmer (about 50 head) who also uses the manure with forage corn to make bio-gas (methanol) to burn for electricity to sell to the grid. They receive Euro 0.17c/kwh for the ‘green’ energy, and buy their household electricity back at 0.11c/kwh- what a lurk!! They combine the manure and green silage into a large bladder in a tank and siphon the gas off to a generator which puts out 300kw/hour. The process takes about 100kw/h, the house heating takes 100kw/h and they sell the balance. Working on some rough figures I reckon he was achieving around 18% return on capital which seem to correlate with the farmer’s thinking as he was going to put another converter in the next couple of years. Land value at Euro 10,000 – 50,000/ha. He was also an organic dairy and receives Euro 0.35c/litre verses 0.30 for normal but doesn’t believe the dairy contributes any profit to farm, just work and manure. Great bloke, when I told him he could sell his farm of 100ha in Germany and buy one in Australia many, many times as large he thought about it for a minute, and then laughingly told me he would miss the lifestyle here.

Next to a Rapeseed oil production operation for fuel, which turned out to be a family-run vegetable and flower glasshouse that also grows some field crops including broadacre pumpkins. They also run a farm-shop 4 days a week. He has a diesel run-about van that was converted to pure oil 10 years ago as a trial and now has over 206,000km on clock with no problems. They sell some oil for human consumption and produce the oil for fuel at about 16% less than standard diesel. Really good guy, gave me a couple of pumpkins for the roast dinner I was cooking that night for the Feiler family, father Horst, mother Hagar, brother Martin and fiancée Kirstin, Heike and sister Beýate(not sure how to spell this but the first half of name sounds like a west Australian saying beer). I have been trialing them on a fair few new foods: pumpkin, lamb’s fry, lamb roast, Moroccan tagines to name a few. Anyway, pumpkin soup and roasted pumpkin hit, lamb roast with mint sauce the same and Beyate had seconds of lamb’s fry!!

Next to Strahle Engineering, one of the more respected oil press companies in Germany for a chat. Only seems like a small operation but I did not see another brand of oil press anywhere, and also seems to be fairly switched on- exporting to Ireland and a number of other countries including one to Australia a few years ago. They feel that their presses could press cottonseed without any major problems- just the feed of fuzzy cotton seed in the intake part of press. Business been around 60-70 years and been doing oil presses for 20 years.

I next headed of to Regensburg to meet the CEO of Bioltec, a fairly new company that is making fairly large inroads into the diesel-to-oil engine conversion market in Germany and other countries like Ireland and Spain. They seem to have a fairly good system which he had many examples of successful conversions in trucks and some tractors including JD 6810’s.

It always seems to rain here so haven’t seen much irrigation but did make an effort which I will detail later.

Off to Straubing to meet a contact I got through Caroline Brown- thanks Caroline. The German Department of Ag have a Center for Competence there which is focused on bio-fuels. I met with the head of the Department, Dr Remmele and his 2nd in charge Klaus Thuneke. They were brilliant and were happy to provide a very good summary of the problems and successes of bio-oil as fuel in Germany. I am fairly convinced that we can use cottonseed oil as fuel but will have to be aware of some issues with motors, oil quality, storage and pressing technology. They talked about a study which has just been completed called the ‘100 tractor program’ which I am trying to get the English outcomes from. Not sure if it has been fully written up yet.

Went for a run here and got lost… hour later still staggering around trying to find motel, but am I fit now!!

Somewhere in here I went to Martin and Kirstin’s wedding. Beautiful affair, even if I had trouble translating ‘…until death do us part…’. The reception was relaxed with much humour, at one stage Martin was put into the centre of the dance floor with a chair and told to do a strip-tease for his new wife.

Seemed to be the time for weddings as next Heike and I popped over to England to go to my Godfather’s son’s wedding. They held it in Ruth’s uncle’s paddock in a marquee- only small problem of a lot of wind and rain. Beautiful ceremony in the marquee, with a few fearful glances at the wildly swinging and flickering chandeliers high in the tent. There was an intermission before the reception for Pimms and ice-creams from Mr Whippy- you had to brave the elements to get your ice-cream outside, and the ice-cream van got bogged leaving the field!! Heike and I took an idea from Martin’s wedding and manufactured a wooden box for our present- during the wedding we got everyone to write down their ideas on where Stu and Ruth would be in 7 years, and we put those papers into the box with a bottle of champagne and got Stu to nail it closed. Went down a treat. However, you try buying a wooden box one day that you can nail shut easily and you’ll work out why we had to make our own- and had an interesting time searching for an engraver to do a small plaque to put on top.

Next we headed off to the University of Hohenheim to meet with one of Germany’s leading Water Use Efficiency researchers. Professor Kleisinger was a very interesting chat- vegetarian, 63 years old, and about to run his first marathon. Anyway, he and his Doctoral Students there and in Mexico were working on computer models for different crops so that they could predict plant water use and need without expensive soil moisture and plant monitors, only using basic weather and crop infra-red tools. Sounded like a good deal, not having to buy $4,000 per unit soil moisture metres… However, their work has concentrated on broad scale vegetable crops so far. He also had some ideas on water injection techniques to give a seeding the moisture to get down to deep-buried drip tape. Interesting to note the local state regulations requires drinking water quality irrigation water has to be used on overhead spray irrigation on vegetables- very much a contrast with California, with recycled grey water not to potable level was being used.

I also got to meet the Uni expert in bio-fuels, Herr Koenig. He was a farmer who consulted to the university and his experience very much backed up the information I got from the Centre for Excellence in Straubing. I am hoping if I can get back over some time to visit his farm to see how he does things in practice.

From there I had a couple of last fantastic meals with the Feiler family and Heike before getting on a plane in Munich for New York. Arrived in New York to find I bore a striking resemblance to some other undesirable with blond hair and an Australian passport named Andrew Watson- hauled off to the ‘little’ room for a while until that got sorted out, then was relieved to be met by my friend Gabbi Cusak.

In summary I guess, Germany really is the place for bio-oil research as they have been looking at it for over 20 years now, and I felt the machinery was developed to fairly high standards. Anyway, I am getting into the last two weeks of this awesome adventure- am getting a little sick of wearing the same clothes and sleeping in a different bed every night- but I have high hope for what I am going to learn in the States.