TYKOCIN, Poland - (KRT) - A decade ago, it was common to see farmers in this hardscrabble patch of eastern Poland turning their fields with horse-drawn plows. These days, such sights are considered quaint.
Poland has been a member of the European Union for little more than a year, but EU money already is transforming the countryside. As the largest of the 10 new member states, Poland is getting about half the annual $12 billion in aid that the EU has set aside for the new members, an amount that is expected to double after next year and continue until 2013.
Over the last decade, generous EU aid transfers helped Ireland, Spain and Greece catch up to their West European neighbors, and now Poland, Slovakia and other new EU members from the former Soviet bloc are hoping their turn is about to come.
Henryk Cackowski, 53, a farmer in Tykocin, strides across his fields with the rolling gait of a sailor searching for his land legs. As a result of a rare bone disease, he has a pair of steel implants below the knee that he complains cost him "as much as a small car."
Gruff and wary of big-city strangers, he is the picture of the perpetually aggrieved Polish farmer. But these days, Cackowski is actually smiling. He has a new tractor and a barn full of new dairy equipment thanks in part to an EU agricultural grant.
"I was probably the first in the village to take the risk," said Cackowski, who never had borrowed money before. "There were a lot of forms to fill out, and people from the Ministry of Agriculture came and interviewed me, but I got a 50 percent refund on the equipment."
In the years leading up to Poland joining the EU, Brussels bureaucrats and Polish farmers viewed each other with suspicion. Brussels was unwilling to subsidize Poland's inefficient farms, while Polish farmers feared unfair competition from their heavily subsidized counterparts in Western Europe.
More than $50 billion, almost half the EU budget, is set aside for agricultural subsidies, and farmers in wealthy countries like France take the generous handouts as their due. Since only about 4 percent of the total workforce in France is engaged in agriculture, such largesse has only recently begun to draw the ire of EU taxpayers.
But in Poland, a country of 38 million, nearly a quarter of the workforce still earns its living on the land. The EU made clear it could not afford to pay the usual subsidies to all those Polish farmers, so it offered a quarter of the going rate.
To the fury of the farmers, the Polish government accepted, and a countryside revolt started to gather force.
Andrzej Lepper, a rabble-rousing pig farmer, formed the Self-Defense Party and rode a wave of anti-EU sentiment and xenophobia to give his party a third-place finish in the 2001 parliamentary elections. The Lepper bandwagon continued to roll right up until Poland joined the EU, but it now seems to have lost momentum.
"If you ask the farmers, I think they'll still tell you everything is wrong and it's caused by EU accession, but in the end, it hasn't been a catastrophe for either side," said Edward Majewski, a farm management expert at the Warsaw Agriculture University.
Poland has 2 million farms, but about 1.2 million of them are no larger than 17 acres - the size of a postage stamp by U.S. agricultural standards - and produce only enough to feed the farmer and his family. Of the remaining 800,000 farmsteads, only about 100,000 produce on a commercially viable scale.
In eastern Poland, where poor soil always has meant meager yields, farmsteads of less than 5 to 10 acres still abound.
Tykocin, a market town about 40 miles from the Belarus border, is typical of the region. In the mid-19th Century, its population was 60 percent Jewish. On the eve of World War II, the number of Jews had shrunk to about 2,000, 44 percent of the population.
The Nazis came on Aug. 5, 1941. On that day, 1,400 Jews were rounded up and summarily shot; the rest were shipped off to the Bialystok ghetto.
Today, all that remains of the Jewish presence is the exquisite 17th Century synagogue that stands in the center of the town. It was restored in the 1970s and reopened as a Jewish museum.
The arrival of the EU has meant new sidewalks and streetlights for the sleepy town center and some much-needed road repairs, but the biggest transformation has taken place in the outlying areas where generations of farmers have struggled to eke out a living.
"I was shocked," Majewski said after a recent visit to farms in the area. "I saw huge changes, and the speed at which this is taking place is amazing.
"I was talking to farmers who, 20 years ago, had 17, 18 hectares (42-45 acres). Now they are operating 100. They are buying and leasing as much land as they can. They're buying new equipment and they are simplifying their production structure," he said.
Cezary Gebert, 38, is typical of this new breed of Polish farmer. He has doubled the size of his farm over the last 10 years, from 125 acres to about 250, and later this year, when he finishes construction of a barn that can accommodate 100 cows, he will double the size of his herd.
His business plan is simple: Keep growing by acquiring land from farmers who don't have enough acreage to run a profitable operation.
"If they want to rent, I'll rent. If they want to sell, I'll buy," he said.
The large number of small farms that remain reflects the tenacity of Polish farmers and their almost religious attachment to the land.
Unlike in other former Soviet bloc countries, communist authorities in Poland never had much luck in their attempt to collectivize farming. Less than a quarter of Poland's arable land is in state hands.
But the EU appears to be accomplishing what communism consistently failed to do. It is making Polish farming more efficient by rewarding the largest and most productive operations while gradually phasing out the ones that are too small to make a go of it.
The driving force is the agricultural subsidy. Polish farmers are getting about $20 an acre, on average, from Brussels. Although that is only 25 percent of what their Western European competitors get, it is a significant amount in Poland's economy, topped up by an additional 30 percent from the Polish government.
The EU will increase its contribution by 5 percent a year until Polish farmers reach parity with the rest of the EU in 2013.
The large-scale farmers already are reinvesting the payout from the EU, using the money to buy more land and better equipment, while on the small farms, which now tend to be owned by elderly people, the subsidy serves as a pension supplement.
The benefits brought by the EU are easy to quantify in increased productivity and better land use, but some experts say the biggest changes are psychological. Polish farmers, for the first time in generations, see a future.
Cackowski, the farmer with the new tractor, has two sons. The older is studying law, but the younger one, Karol, 17, plans to go to an agricultural college.
"This is a very good farm, and I will strongly encourage him to join me after he graduates," Cackowski said. "If he decides to do that, we will try to increase the size of our farm by three or four times. Our neighbors are small, and I think we can buy them out."
Similarly, 16-year-old Rafal Gebert, who was supervising the construction of his father's new dairy barn, said he, too, plans to make a career of farming.
"If you're smart and you have enough resources, enough land and enough cows, you can make a very good living in this business," he said.