Measuring up

Angie off early for an appointment in Memmingen, so I followed suit by doing an early dog walk. On the way home saw the parish “building works employees” smart orange Fendt tractor parked up by one of the villages several religious buildings together with a similarly coloured van from the Bavarian Vermessungsamt (Surveying Agency).


Asked Mr Fröhlich what he was up to as it could just have been connected with us getting high speed fibre internet cables laid in the next year. Turned out that friend Mark who lives just off to the right and has his windows and door business there too, has bought the rather “plain” concrete building on the right to store some of his gear including the scaffolding which he also does. Some may remember it was his scaffolding around our house when we had our roof redone. He also replaced two windows at that time.


Mr Fröhlich was there to help the officials dig the holes to bury the new marking plots needed as the plot of land is being divided up. The surveying team were all in to computers and no doubt expensive high tech optical equipment.
Interested me a bit as my father had trained as a chartered surveyor after his father had forbidden him from following his steps in to farming. The 1930’s were bad for farmers and my grandfather was to die shortly and the farm was sold. I remember occasional accompanying my father in to the “bush” of Trinidad with his team to do various surveying jobs in the jungle like conditions. Actually I am sure that even today he would easily recognise and could manipulate the optical bits but the PC work would not be his thing.


The Bavarian Vermessungsamt is nowadays officially called “The Bavarian Agency for Digitalisation, High-Speed Internet and Surveying” and has a very wide range of duties. Some of their Geodata services are openly available giving details about renewable energy as well as maps of the official plots of land. A very important part of our life nowadays.
I guess some of their digital information is fed in to the satellites that control farmers ensuring they do what is required of them to obey the rules for the subsidies they get. Mr Fröhlich is also a farmer and has been blipped before, as have some of his cows.