We'll plough the East, then scatter

As British farmers grow increasingly disenchanted with the state of things at home, more and more of them are turning their attention to central Europe, where costs are a great deal lower, and huge acreages are available. In Hungary, for instance, good land can be rented for £8 or £10 an acre - about a fifth of the average in the United Kingdom - and you can employ a skilled tractor driver for the equivalent of £1,500 to £2,000 a year - a tenth of what he would cost here.

As British farmers grow increasingly disenchanted with the state of things at home, more and more of them are turning their attention to central Europe, where costs are a great deal lower, and huge acreages are available. In Hungary, for instance, good land can be rented for £8 or £10 an acre - about a fifth of the average in the United Kingdom - and you can employ a skilled tractor driver for the equivalent of £1,500 to £2,000 a year - a tenth of what he would cost here.

Under the Communist regime all land was state-owned, and in the early 1990s, after the break-up of the collective farms, there was a period during which foreigners were allowed to buy land through partnerships with Hungarian companies. Pioneers went out from Britain hoping to make money both from farming and from rises in land value. A few managed to acquire farms, but a change in the law closed that window in 1994, and now foreigners may not buy land at all, except by snapping up one of the companies that established themselves during the open period. Individual Hungarians may own up to 300 hectares (750 acres) each, and by British standards prices are still low, ranging from £500 to £1,500 per hectare (£200 to £600 per acre) - roughly a quarter of UK values.

Conditions differ sharply from those in Britain. The climate is more extreme: colder in winter, hotter in summer, with seasons changing quickly. When frost and snow come in November, they generally stay for three or four months; then in spring the temperature suddenly shoots up, so that everything grows fast and vegetables (for instance) are ready six weeks ahead of British produce. In summer arable crops ripen rapidly, and the land grows good, hard wheat suitable for milling. At least, that is how it has always been in the past. This year the snow melted early, a fortnight ago, and instead of being frozen, the land is flooded. Global warming seems to be hitting Hungary like everywhere else.

One problem for the new managers has been that the Communist regime saw state farms as useful places for providing employment, so that the incomers found they had three or four times as many workers as they needed. Numbers have had to be pruned severely, and naturally it is the younger men and women who have adapted better to new methods. One positive feature is that many of the men are skilled mechanics and engineers: having had to battle for years with inferior Russian machinery, which constantly broke down, they are adept at making spare parts themselves and effecting their own repairs. Now farmers import almost all their big machinery from the West or from America, helped by 25 per cent grants from the Hungarian government.

The Communist era took a heavy toll on the environment. With the creation of collective farms, most of the hedges were grubbed out, and fields of 1,000 acres became commonplace. Even today a 200-acre field is routine - and the removal of nesting cover has led to a disastrous decline in the numbers of grey partridges, once the wonder of the Hortobagy Plain. Great bustards survive in a few places, but they are increasingly rare.

There are no farmhouses in the sense that we know them - farmers tend to live in the villages - but the landscape is dotted with the ruins of castles and stately houses that were once the homes of landowners. Many of these wrecks can be acquired for literally nothing: the government will give them away to anyone prepared to do them up.

Often not even a ruin survives. I shall never forget the moment, during my only visit to Hungary, when I spotted what had obviously been a nobleman's park. We were driving across country near Mátészalka, close to the Russian border in the east, when I suddenly noticed a pattern that was somehow familiar. On our right, fields rose pleasantly towards woods on a hill in the background. In the open ground close to us stood two or three specimen trees - the remains of an avenue. At the top of the rise, the land levelled off in a small plateau.

"Is that where the big house stood?" I asked the gamekeeper in charge of our party. The question made the man turn pale, because he thought I was somehow psychic. Yet it was I, not he, who had seen a ghost. "Yes," he faltered. "That was the home of Count X, who went to America between the wars when things started looking bad in Germany." Local people, he said, had carried away every stone of the building for their own houses.

The British farmers who set up shop in Hungary are not much worried by such echoes from the past. Rather, their eyes are on the future, and the opportunities that will open up when the country joins the EU in 2003 or 2004.

Among the front runners was Peter Merrikin, a Bedfordshire farmer who first went out in the late 1980s to launch a game-shooting enterprise, saw what opportunities agriculture offered, and put together a consortium to start contract farming. Today their company, Tisza Farm Produce, farms 30,000 acres - the largest British holding in Hungary - near Kisköre, some 80 miles east of Budapest, and Peter also acts as an agent, taking out parties of prospective investors. His son Richard has gone to live there and run the business, and is to marry a Hungarian in the autumn. For a mere £500,000 the Merrikins will sell you the buildings, cattle and machinery on a farm near Szolnok, where 2,500 acres are for rent.

Meanwhile the estate agents FPDSavills is offering for sale a 13,000-acre holding known as Kutas 95 RT, in the east, near the city of Debrecen. As Henry Wilkes, its lively associate director, points out, this is a rare opportunity, for a group of British farmers, together with a Hungarian partner, bought the property during the open period and still owns the freehold. You can acquire not only the land, but four combine harvesters, 24 tractors, sundry farm equipment, 760 head of cattle, a manager's house and two detached cottages, "both in need of refurbishment". I seem to have heard that phrase before. But anyone with £5m to spare, step forward.