Organic Farm

Let yourself be pampered here on our organic farm

Enjoy genuine life in the country on a Salzburg farm at an elevation of 1120m. Here is a newspaper article from the "Salzburger Nachrichten" dated October 13, 2001

Contact with Cows:

When kids run around and play in the stables on a farm, they become less prone to asthma. Regular contact with cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens – as well as livestock on a farm – protects children from the later development of allergies and allergy-related sicknesses such as asthma. This was proven by a study group under university professor Dr. Josef Riedler from Salzburg Children’s Hospital (LKH). This scientific work was first presented hardly two years ago at the European Lung Congress in Madrid. Only now, however, has it been widely circulated in the British professional journal "The Lancet" (vol. 258, pg. 1129).

A total of 2283 children aged eight to ten were polled by a questionnaire about their lifestyle and the frequency of allergy symptoms. Surveys were conducted in several provinces and in the framework of an international context. With 1137 of the children, the doctors involved in this scientific study also conducted a "skin prick test" to determine possible existing hypersensitivity to allergies.

When analyzing the data, the experts encountered astonishing results. "When we observed the data, we determined that children who lived on a farm were three times less likely to suffer from hay fever than those children who lived in an urban environment", the findings stated. According to these, only 1.1 percent of children from rural areas complained about hay fever symptoms. The percentage for children from urban areas, in contrast, was 3.9 percent.

These reports were substantiated by the skin test: With allergens applied to the skin, hypersensitivity was documented with 32.7 percent of town children, whereas the percentage was only 18.8 percent for children from farms.
Riedler and his co-authors documented the protective effects, including through yet another analysis. They investigated how children's contact with farm animals - regardless of where they permanently resided - be that the town or country - affected the occurrence of allergies. The result: Those girls and boys with regular animal contact demonstrated similarly reduced susceptibility to allergies as those children from farms.

Riedler sees the protective effects of rural life with respect to allergies as being due to the "development of a tolerance" resulting from frequent contact with germs and a variety of antigens. Several scientific investigations of recent years have shown that children growing up in "clinically clean" households are more inclined towards allergies. This also applies to only-children, whilst those children with many siblings or early contact with others of the same age (at nursery schools etc.) are less likely to show allergic reactions.

Experts believe that allergies and related ailments such as asthma are increasing in western industrialized states because the immune system of people in conditions that are too clean, faced with a "lack" of natural stimuli, produce reactions or excessive defensive responses directed at their own body.