‘I am at home in Belarus’

After 20 years of living in Austria, the Belarusian returned to her homeland and set up an agro-eco-farm

Natalya Strok is the owner of a goat farm in the village of Vysokoye, Bereza District. Having lived in an Austrian town on the banks of the Danube for 20 years, she came to her husband’s small homeland and fulfilled herself in agrotourism. She says this is where she feels at home and has managed to create the perfect space for life and personal growth.

Natalya Strok, owner of agro-eco-estate Dary Matuli in Vysokoye, Brest Region 

Goat therapy

Natalya opens the gate of one of the goat pens, “Girls, come out! Bela, my dear, come to mum!” 
Lively goats are running towards us — horned and hornless, white and spotted. One of them jumps up and licks Natalya’s cheek. “Great massage,” the hostess jokes. “I undergo goat therapy all the time. Maybe that is why I don’t have wrinkles on my face?” 
Goats like to be petted and treated with bread, they are affectionate and well-mannered, according to the farm owner, “They are also neat and very smart. We can both have a fight and cuddle. Bela is the main one here. This one is named Natasha in my honour. It is just like me: it looks quiet but will always do what it has in mind.” 
We notice that a dozen white goats are stained with paints. Are they really marked for culling? “No, of course not,” the hostess laughs. “A group of forty children came here on a tour. It was difficult to keep their attention. So we distributed markers and allowed them to draw on the backs of goats. Everyone was delighted, both children and animals. Real goat therapy!” 
The first 12 ‘girls’ appeared on Natalya Strok’s farm in the spring of 2021. There are now more than 100 animals of seven different breeds living on the farm. Sixty of them need to be milked twice a day. For this purpose, five special machines were installed so that the milkmaid does not have to bend her back during milking. Each goat gives up to two litres of milk daily.
“At first, I did not understand what responsibility I had taken on,” Natalya admits. “I studied, by trial and error, and now they are all like children to me.” 
Natalya makes five varieties of soft goat cheese from milk. The balls in different toppings are packed in small jars with vegetable oil. The craft product is sold through social media and, of course, during tours. “It is profitable to raise goats. But I do not sell them for meat. I milk them and make cheese. I refer to my business as manufacture, because we will never be a huge business — after all, everything is based on manual labour,” the entrepreneur emphasises.

  

‘They will always help here’

Natalya is the daughter of a military man, the family lived in Hungary. Then her parents moved to Bereza District. Natasha stayed there, got married, and when she got divorced, she also moved to Bereza District. She organised a pasta factory, a restaurant, and a pastry workshop here. Then she married for the second time, to Ivan Strok from the village of Strigin, and went with him to Austria.…
When I asked her why she came back, she laughed, “I have grown older, apparently. Having been born and raised in the city, having lived in Europe, now I cannot imagine myself without a Belarusian village, without pine-scented air, without the Sporovsky swamp, and without my beloved goats.”
All of her four children live in Austria. They come to help, though. At first, her elder son, Aleksandr, worked on the farm, then the younger son, Ivan, delved into the essence of business for a year. Now Natalya is waiting for her husband to become her assistant. “It is time to return to our homeland,” she says. “There are good people in Austria, but they are different. We have little in common: different politics, different cuisine... They would help me in Austria too, but you have to ask there. In Vysokoye, in contrast, people come to the rescue themselves. Once I had problems with feed, so many offered hay. The district executive committee, the village council — everyone is ready to help, and everyone supports. So I cannot complain.” 
Natalya is proud that Bereza District has added a tourist component to the status of an industrial area of Brest Region, and she deserves credit for her contribution.
In 2019, the Vysokovsky Ecological and Ethnographic Centre was established, the purpose of which is to develop small and medium-sized businesses in rural areas. Then it was given the status of an entrepreneurship support centre, which was headed by Natalya Strok. The initiative is aimed at creating business cases that entrepreneurs can apply in their business. It was this project that helped her get four breeds of goats, which is how the unusual farm and agro-eco-estate Dary Matuli [Mother’s Gifts] emerged in Vysokoye.
Natalya is currently implementing a new large-scale project to build an agro-eco-park spanning 12 hectares with an ethnographic site in Vysokoye. She hopes that it will become a great place for a family vacation, “A lot is being done in Belarus to encourage people to go into rural business. We have low rent on land. Meanwhile, land is wealth. The village was unpromising, but now houses are being bought here. People like me, who lived abroad, also come here. Today, everything in Vysokoye mainly revolves around the unique Sporovsky Nature Reserve and the rare warbler bird that lives in it. Yet, we, owners of farmsteads, are not lagging behind: we are developing and welcoming guests.” 

Tatyana's younger son Ivan helping at the goat farm 

By Valentina Kozlovich

Photos by Pavel Bogush