In forest and field fires, the outcome rarely turns on how many crews turn out. It turns on a mundane question: how do you get water to a place with no hydrant? "Supplying firefighting water, especially in woodland, is our Achilles heel," says Dietmar Seefeldt, the district administrator of Südliche Weinstraße. An answer has long been parked in thousands of German machine sheds — it just had to become findable.
That is what the online portal Red Farmer does. Farmers and winegrowers register their contact details and the equipment they would make available in an emergency: slurry tankers and water carts to haul firefighting water, disc harrows and cultivators to cut firebreaks, wheel loaders to clear debris. Fire services and control rooms get access and can see at a glance who nearby can offer what. According to the initiative, around 500 farming and forestry businesses with nearly 1,000 machines are registered across Germany.
The difference that makes is visible in the case of Mathias Lichti, a farmer in the southern Palatinate: his slurry tanker holds 18,000 litres — many times what a single fire engine delivers to the scene.
A week of improvisation became a nationwide network
The initiative started in the southern Palatinate in 2022, modelled on an idea from the Main-Spessart district fire association and thrown together within a week in response to acute fire risk. It is backed by the Rhineland-Palatinate state fire association and the farming and winegrowing associations of Rhineland-Nassau and Rhineland-Palatinate South. The Bavarian state fire association and the Bavarian Farmers' Association now promote the portal among their members, describing it as a directory of "organised spontaneous helpers." Businesses in Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania have joined as well.
The legal questions on which such help usually founders have been settled. In Rhineland-Palatinate, helpers called upon by an incident commander are covered by municipal accident insurance under the state fire protection act; in Bavaria, commanders may call on people for up to three days, insured through the Bavarian municipal accident insurer. Vehicles, equipment and labour are billed at the rates of the nearest machinery ring.
None of it is compulsory. A farmer in the middle of harvest, or one who needs the tanker himself, simply declines — the voluntary principle runs both ways, and it is why businesses sign up at all.
The value grows with the risk. Hot, dry summers are bringing fire services ever more vegetation fires, and the hydrant network stops precisely where those fires start. "Given the current danger from forest and vegetation fires, fire services depend on help from farmers to respond quickly," says Frank Hachemer, president of the Rhineland-Palatinate state fire association. What is striking about Red Farmer is that this reinforcement requires no new station and no new fleet — only an inventory of what is already standing nearby.