One day in early summer 2018, Yvonne Lang was standing on the edge of her field in a small village in Upper Franconia and was angry.
A cloud of pesticides passed over the field.
Her tenant was hosing down the potato plants, undisturbed by the fact that she and her children were standing right next to it.
"That was enough for me," Lang recalls today, four years later.
She decided to farm her 37 hectares herself from now on, using organic farming, alongside her job as a stewardess.
Anna Lena Ripperger
Editor in Politics.
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Some would have laughed at her back then.
A flight attendant as an organic farmer, how should that work?
"But I haven't regretted it a day," says Lang.
She is standing in her kitchen stirring a pot of chicken soup.
She slaughtered the chicken herself.
She keeps a dual-purpose breed that is just as good at laying eggs as it is at fattening.
"But we eat very little meat," she quickly adds.
"And before death, the animals have a glorious life."
Yvonne Lang is one of more than 335,400 women working in agriculture in Germany, full-time, part-time or as self-employed.
This means that about a third of the agricultural workforce are women.
As plant manager, Yvonne Lang is an exception.
Only every ninth company is run by a woman.
In order to get a better picture of the situation of women farmers, a study by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture will run until September.
It's about workload and appreciation, volunteering and family.
What burdens the women, what motivates them?
"My father had to become a farmer, I wanted it"
“I used to love being among the cows when I was a kid,” says Lang.
The animals, nature, her home village in the Fichtel Mountains all give her energy.
And it drives her to do something to change agriculture - at least on a small scale, on her farm.
She is annoyed that prices often determine what consumers buy in the supermarket and how farmers organize their production.
It is absurd that animals for meat production sometimes still have to suffer the way she experienced as a child.
Lang is 47 years old and grew up on a farm.
Her father Rainer took over the business at the age of 18 - not voluntarily, his father had died unexpectedly.
Actually, Rainer Lang would have preferred to learn another profession, but he came to terms with it.
Until a hormone scandal in the 1980s caused the demand for veal to plummet from one day to the next.
Shortly before he had invested a lot of money in new stables.
After the burglary, he first sold the cows and then gave up altogether.
"My father had to become a farmer, I wanted it," says Yvonne Lang.
But when she finished school, that wasn't an option.
There was no longer a farm, only leased fields and loans from the bank.
Lang trained as an industrial clerk, went abroad as an au pair and became a flight attendant.