Pastureland

But rainfall increased in 2010. That, along with improved distribution of agricultural inputs, such as seed, fertilizer and pesticide, led to a record harvest. There was also a rebound in pastureland countrywide.

Andrei Davidov took up farming 10 years ago after a career in the military and a stint as a publisher. He took the proceeds from the sale of his publishing firm and began to buy land here in Kaluga from shareholders of an old collective farm. He now has over 600-hectares of rolling pastureland and some 150-head of cattle. He uses the Internet to order supplies, like his electric fencing, which he gets from the United States. Several small cottages surrounded by garden plots and apple trees are where Andrei, his wife Marina and some of their farm workers live.

"[The steppe's] eastern borderlands had marched from the mid-eleventh century with the pasturelands of a people known to the Latins and Byzantines as the Cumans"