This makes the industry in Schleswig-Holstein very sustainable!
Holstein cows originally come from Schleswig-Holstein, and as such, this area boasts one of the biggest dairy industries in all of Germany (and Europe!) At the university, we also have an exceptionally strong agriculture program, specifically dairy-related, and I just met a researcher who is studying how to minimize cow farts! Really! That might sound very funny, but it is a really important thing to study in terms of minimizing the carbon output of cows, because the way that cows digest their foods produces a lot of methane, which is a really bad form of greenhouse gas! With any luck, his work will make beef production much more environmentally friendly... and he traveled here to Kiel to study it!
Because of that same western wind and our proximity to the water, it is often quite damp here. This means that mold in homes is a really big worry! Because of this, we have to be very careful about drying our clothing. We have an indoor clothesline, partly because drying your clothes in a clothes dryer is also not common here in Germany. We need to make sure that there is a good balance between ventilating the space and not letting too much chill into our home!
That is where this very German concept to which I have been introduced comes in: Stoßlüften ('stoss-leuften'). This is so important that sometimes it is even included in people's rental contracts! According to this practice, once a day, for a minute or two, one must open the windows wide open and exchange out the air!
