Bucking Trend, This Pole Is Staying Down on the Farm : Eastern Europe: Others protest imports, and many can’t make a living. But a 22-year-old plans to expand.

Grzegorz Maleszewski is 22 years old, tall and thin as the rough-sawed pine planks cut from the forests on his land. In his bemired work clothes, mucking out the cowshed or stalking across the barn lot with a load of hay riding high on a pitchfork, he has the appearance of an animated scarecrow but a face to which a wry smile comes readily, and often.

Maleszewski is a content young man, and that is not an easy mood to find these days on a Polish farm. In fact, he might be considered something of a rarity for one other important reason: Bucking the general trend of demography and economics, he has decided that his future is here, on this land. He wants to be a farmer, and a good one, a successful one.

“I belong here,” he said. “I think it can be a good life.”

In the three years since the 1989 political upheaval that routed the Communists from power in Poland, agriculture has been going through its own painful transitions. The most militant farm groups have staged bitter protests against government policies that allow the importation of foreign food products, undercutting Polish agriculture--the protesters say--and driving down prices.

They would also like a return to government-guaranteed price supports.

Maleszewski (pronounced Mal-ah-SHEV-ski) wishes prices were higher too. What farmer wouldn’t? But he has no time for protests or organizations, and he gives politics only cursory, passing notice. He does not see complaining, moaning, agitating as the way to get ahead.

“ Ack ,” Maleszewski said, waving his hand, “it’s just noise.”

But the noise from the farmland signifies a basic shakeout in Polish agriculture, a sector that some experts see as a potential buffer against some of the shocks of the transition to a market economy, perhaps absorbing some of the growing unemployment in heavy industry.

The rural population of Poland is about 15 million, roughly 40% of the population, which is about the same as elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Remarkably, this figure has not changed since the early 1950s.

But unlike other countries once under the yoke of Soviet economic planners, Communist authorities here were never able to collectivize the land, fearing--for good reason--a general peasant revolt in the countryside.

Although huge landholdings were redistributed and broken up by the Communists, the vast majority of the rural lands remained in private hands, with only a few large state farms created across the country.

One effect of this history is the small size of Polish farms, the average being 12 acres. Generally, the land is divided into narrow strips, which are seldom contiguous; farmers who live in small villages, such as Lipki, where Maleszewski lives, may have several fields scattered in different locations. Maleszewski has one field more than 15 miles from his home.

Another of the effects, more pronounced in recent years, is that fewer families can live from farming alone. At least 40% supplement their incomes with outside jobs. Many men, for example, take city jobs, in construction or as night watchmen, leaving the farm work to their wives or working fitfully at the land on their days off.

There are 42,000 towns classified as farming communities in Poland, 82% of them with a population of less than 500. The roads connecting them are poor and potholed. Only 29% of these villages have piped water supplies or sewage systems; only 8% have telephones. Lipki, again, is typical: There isn’t a single telephone in the village, and every house has its own well.

The farm population is also an aged one. Thousands of farm acres lie fallow, held--perhaps--by widows or elderly farmers who live on meager pensions. And although the land has become virtually useless to such people, they hang onto it, reluctant to sell. In a way, it is an element of the mentality of the countryside, which, most sociologists would say, is a peasant mentality.

Indeed, the countryside, in many respects, is a bastion of “old Poland,” where the elderly still remember the traditions of the manor house, where the obligations and responsibilities that accrued to the “gentry” still apply, in some vague way, to their sense of how things ought to be.

Roughly halfway between Warsaw and the Russian border, the village of Lipki is in the heart of this cautious heartland, a village as characteristically Polish as any in the republic.

The land around is as flat as a playing field, for miles and miles, and it takes no strain to envision on its low horizon a column of German tanks, Napoleon’s legions or Russian caissons in history’s long stop-time of advance and retreat. All have passed this way, paused to do battle in the forests, left their sober imprint, then departed.

In one of Maleszewski’s woodland stands, a quarter-mile line of evenly spaced depressions, filled now with a 50-year cushion of pine needles, marks a line of defensive foxholes, perhaps German or Russian or Polish partisans. The Nazi death camp of Treblinka lies only 20 miles away.

To the receptive eye, the landscape possesses its own beauty, the flatness distantly interrupted by stands of thick forest, deep green curtains of pine laced with the silver thread of birches; the fields, in autumn, yellow and softly hazed, or transformed to an ocean of white under winter snow, or dotted with blossoming fruit trees in spring’s reawakening.

Now, in summer, the season’s first cutting of hay is in, the strips of grain in the fields are being harvested. At the fringes of the forests, tiny wild blueberries grow in profusion, and a lush and magnificent calm seems to settle, with the heat, over the land.

At such a time, it is not difficult to understand Maleszewski’s commitment to this land, to holding onto this way of life and to seeing his fortunes grow, in the steady, deliberate manner that is his way.

Maleszewski lives on the farm with his two younger sisters, his mother, Elzbieta, and his father’s aging parents, “Dziadek” and “Babcza” (Grandpa and Grandma) Maleszewski. His father, Waclaw, died three years ago of liver cancer, at age 46.

It was the death of his father, when Maleszewski was only 19 years old, and the sudden thrust of responsibility, that brought him so quickly to the decision to remain on the farm, Maleszewski admits. It is a decision that places him in the clear minority of farm youth these days.

Of course, the farm life was the only life he knew; he was born in the old three-room house set just to the side of the two-story brick house that was finished only three months after his father died. Now his grandparents, both 77, live in the old house.

The surrounding barns, the shed for the pigs, the last horse left on the farm (his grandfather’s faithful 14-year-old mare, Baszka), the hay barn, the milk barn are, effectively, the mental landscape of his life, familiar as his own calloused palm.

But in one important respect, the Maleszewskis are unusual. Their land, a total of 36 hectares (roughly 80 acres), puts them among 1% of Polish farm families. Of this land, about half is forest, the rest planted in rye, hay crops, potatoes and a hybrid cattle-feed grain known locally as pszezyto. They have a dozen pigs, a bearing sow, eight cows producing milk and four calves.

By the standards of the countryside, they are doing all right. But this is a long way from prosperous.

For the first time in her life, Elzbieta Maleszewski, Maleszewski’s mother, has put the equivalent of $600 in a savings account. It is the largest sum of ready cash that the family has had. Ever.

A few months ago, Maleszewski’s mother began keeping an account book, resumed 2 1/2 years after her husband’s death; the first numbers on the first pages are in his handwriting. She sits at the kitchen table while Maleszewski looks on laconically and goes over the numbers from July.

“We sold one calf,” she said. “That was 738,000 zlotys. From the milk, we got 3,161,000. Potatoes, 1,500,000. We sold and butchered a steer, that was 3,500,000.” The dollar equivalent for that, roughly, is $800.

But then there was the matter of the manure loader, which was Maleszewski’s doing, and it set back the income about $300. It was a controversial purchase. “I did mention it to Mother a few times,” Maleszewski said in an understatement.

“For me, it is too quick,” Elzbieta said. “I ask him not to do things so quickly. There are other things we need. You can see yourself, the house needs more beds, more chairs. It would have been better to wait, that’s what I think.”

Dziadek, too, frowns on Maleszewski’s penchant for buying equipment, machinery. The old man still does not drive the tractor, wants no part of it. He is content to work the fields with Baszka pulling the plow or the harrow, to haul in the cut firewood loaded into the old wooden wagon.

Sometimes the differences bring quick, sharp arguments; the placid Maleszewski, his sisters say, will actually yell at the old man and tell him to mind his own business. The girls, Jola, 21, and Eva, 16, seem embarrassed by these small storms and say their brother is not nearly as mild as he seems on the surface.

“He storms into things sometimes,” Jola said. “If Father had lived, he would have taught him things more deliberately, taught him more patience.”

His grandfather, Maleszewski said, “hasn’t even seen the manure loader yet. He won’t be impressed.”

Grandpa, in Maleszewski’s way of looking at the world, just didn’t get it about the loader: manure is vital, you couldn’t get along without it as a fertilizer, not on this sandy soil ranked as fifth- or sixth-class in the Polish rating system--the absolute bottom, in other words. You either shoveled the manure, put something in that pine-acid soil, or you didn’t get a crop worth the name.

But his grandfather knew only one kind of manure loader, the human kind, attached to a pitchfork by strong arms and a strong back, the way it had always been done on this land, back as far as, well, the Cossacks, the Tatars.

The Maleszewskis sprang from the Tatars, as the old man recounts the history; they were a big name around here, or at least a plentiful name, which indicated a big chief back there somewhere, someone who had seeded the land with his progeny, which progeny then went on to hack down the forests and plant the fields and fill up the graveyards with headstones carved with the proud name Maleszewski.

Maleszewskis and manure loaders didn’t seem somehow to add up in the same column for the grandfather. The Maleszewskis were gentry--which was not quite nobility and certainly not aristocracy--but definitely gentry.

It seems a curious distinction, after the great leavening of communism and the imposition of a system in which, more or less, everyone seemed equally poor.

And yet, in the countryside, it has meaning, some linkage to a heritage that won’t quite go away.

Elzbieta, with no hesitation, notes that her own family came from the peasantry and that her husband, by taking her as his wife, “married beneath himself.” And Dziadek, with his ramrod straight carriage, his firm, direct manner and handshake, is different in manner from those, who, from more humble country origins, tend to doff their caps and shuffle uncomfortably before strangers.

Driving along a poorly graded country road with a visitor, he notes that the work was obviously done by a wloscianin , an archaic word for peasant, with a peasant’s sloppy mentality and poor sense of quality--the opposite of the good gospodarz , the landlord, the man of responsibility.

But Maleszewski’s view is toward the future.

“If I want to expand,” he said, “I need equipment. There is some land I want to buy. It is just next to one of my best fields. It belongs to a relative, and they don’t want to sell it now, but maybe next year.”

And, just a short distance from that field are others, lying fallow, held onto by an old woman, an old man and another man, a local drunk who hasn’t worked in years. They are no longer able to work the land, but, in the old, conservative manner of the countryside, they do not want to let go of it.

Although the land now brings them nothing, they hold it as a kind of security. In a year or two, three at the most, he figures, they’ll be willing to sell, and he’ll be ready to buy.

“If I get more land,” Maleszewski said, “I’m going to need equipment to put it to use. Sometimes you can get good used equipment now at a good price.”

If some of the machinery, at the moment, stands idle, he said, it nevertheless remains an investment. He now has a combine, a good hay mower, rake and hay wagon.

His latest investment, in addition to the manure loader, is a potato harvester. And he can use it not only on his own crop--80% of which is now sold to brokers who in turn sell the potatoes for shipment to Russian or Ukrainian markets--but he can hire it out to harvest for other farmers, as well. It brings in cash, which one day will buy land.

However impatient Maleszewski may seem to his grandfather--or measured by the standards of the Polish countryside--he moves deliberately by contrast with the breakneck entrepreneurial pace of the city. But he has his plan, however quietly laid and closely held, that centers on a vision for the future, one that is solid and positive, qualities rare enough in any setting, urban or rural.

And there is time, time to spend three hours on a summer’s day, between haying and harvesting, to pick a five-gallon bucketful of blueberries, to doze off after lunch in the heat of the day, full of fresh blueberry perozki , and think, perhaps of the girl he has recently started to go out with.

Mother and sisters are looking toward a marriage for him somewhere in the not-too-distant future. In this area, his patience, for once, is undisputed.

He smiles and shrugs.

“I have lots of time,” he said.

Down on the Farm

The rural population of Poland is about 15 million, roughly 40% of the population. Farms remain small, partly because of the Communists’ inability to collectivize the land. Here is how farm output compares to other goods and services. Industry: 33% Trade: 20% Services: 18 Agriculture and Forestry: 15% Construction: 10% Transportation Communication: 5%

Numbers do not add up to 100% because of rounding