In spite of the Ministry’s best efforts, urbanization continued. It was a source of worry due to its effect on birthrates; in the Darwinist worldview where the nation’s death lay around the corner, infertility and food insecurity were things to fear. And birthrates were still falling in the countryside, as women were overworked due to the general high demand for labour in the mid 30s (with unemployment already very low) and the pressure to secure better harvests (from 1934 onwards the climate was unfavorable). In 1937 manpower shortages in the fields had to be supplemented by Labour Front draftees, soldiers, convicts and schoolchildren.

Properties were stratified according to size ownership in large estates (>100 ha), viable medium farms (10-100 ha) and poor marginal farms (<10 ha). Junkers employed conventional wage labour and supporting personnel. Medium farms in the 20-100 range employed servants and maids who received part of their pay in kind. 20 hectares was the minimum farm size for a guaranteed livelihood but estates of 10-20 ha were viable with good soil and close markets. Below 10 ha, some peasants could supplement their income with other activities but full-time labourers were overworked paupers.
Land was concentrated, with estates in excess of 500 ha representing 0,2% of the farms and 25% of the farmland. 88% of the farming population had less than the critical 20 ha threshold.
Marginal farmers would see their life improve if they had more land. One solution would be land reform, and for decades one plan for land reform had been proposed by many from centrists to the radical right: the breaking up of eastern Junker estates and settlement of East Prussia with small viable peasant farms, which would alleviate poverty, expand food production and provide a demographic bulwark against the Poles. The Weimar Republic accepted this and had a land reform program. It didn’t go far because of Junker resistance and high costs. But its more fundamental problem was arithmetic. Even if all cultivated land were equally divided among the rural population, every family would receive 13 hectares, less than the minimum viable size.
So “land hunger” wasn’t jingoistic Nazi rhetoric but a reality. As a topic it wasn’t an exclusivity to Germany, as it was a prime motivation for the conquest of the Americas and the still ongoing settlement of Russian Asia. Germany really had a ratio of rural population to land far higher than France, Britain and America.

In light of this, Nazi agrarianism sought not to set back the clock all the way to the 18th century but a rebirth of renaissance of the countryside. Their target audience was neither the most marginal farmers nor the Junkers, the latter calling them “agrarian bolshevists”, but the medium peasants. They occupied the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, organized assemblies and festivals, made peasant courts, defined law and policy –but not to the full desired extent, as their interests clashed with those of other constituencies- and formed a powerful organization, the Reichnaehrstand (RNS). Funded by a tax on every farm, it had over 20,000 employees and overwhelming economic powers, controlling 40% of the workforce and influencing the life of even the rural population. Its oversight reached even cooperatives, merchants and food industries and covered “every nook and cranny” of the countryside with an Orstbauernfuehrer in every one of the country’s 55,000 villages, and above, 500 Kreisbauernfuehrer and 19 Landesbauernfuehrer, with 3 divisions for ideology, farmyard and market issues.