From time immemorial, each estate in Hallertau has borne an own name. In 1890, the young farming couple, Georg and Maria Seitz, purchased the stately, isolated farm “Zum Baur” in Nietenhausen. To this day, the name is still in use. Fourteen children resulted from this union. Some of them died already in childhood or, as in the case of two sons, died in World War I. In 1922, the farm burned to the ground for the first time. Merely one bed could be saved from the flames. The current residence house was built in the wake of this fire disaster. In 1937, the heir to the estate, Bartholomäus Seitz, married Maria Kellerer from the neighboring village of Oberlauterbach. Hard work, tenacity and skill enabled them to successfully guide their farm through the harsh war years and subsequent inflation. On 10 August 1959, a major fire destroyed the farm’s outbuilding. The day after the fire witnessed a terribly tragedy when – during the cleanup efforts – a wall collapsed burying five men underneath it. Three were recovered from the rubble badly injured, among them the eldest of the family’s two sons; two men were killed in the accident. In 1966, Bartholomäus Seitz succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 61. His widow, Maria Seitz, managed the farm until turning it over to her son Georg and his wife Katharina in 1978. The oldest of their two sons, Florian, has been running the Seitz farm – now in the fourth generation – since 2008. The younger son became a brewer. Hops has been cultivated at the farm in Nietenhausen ever since it was taken over by the Seitz family. In other words, since 1890 – though with varying intensity. In times past, a major part of their land was needed to meet the family’s own nutritional needs. Not only did the extended family need to be sustained but also 5 to 8 helpers and up to 60 hops pickers during the harvest! These largely came from the vicinity of Altöttinger and lived in communal dwellings during the harvest – a circumstance that purportedly also contributed to the baby boom in the 1950s … As the 1960s saw a period where workers increasingly sought employment in the re-emerging industry, it became necessary for hops farmers to search for alternatives to work-intensive harvesting by hand. In 1960, a first hops harvesting machine – a Belgian Alleys Europa – was acquired jointly with the neighboring Sandbichler farm. By 1968, a more powerful Alleys Favorit 7 was put into operation, which proved to be extraordinarily reliable and wasn’t replaced until 2007. At this point, we used a combination of Czech pickers, machine components manufactured by the Fuß Company, as well as quite a bit of machinery that was devised and constructed ourselves. In 2012, a belt drying apparatus replaced the old tray drying method from the 50s. Over the years, the share that the hops harvest contributes to the farm’s operating income has climbed from approximately 1/3 to ca. ¾.

Manager: Florian Seitz, Agricultural Engineer

Current lines of production:
-Hops
-Cereals
-Corn
-Wood