When farmer Alois Schmid first heard that he would have to pay back the state Corona aid he had received in May 2020, he thought it was a joke. But then more and more colleagues reported that the same thing had happened to them. A feeling “as if the ground was being pulled out from under you,” says the farmer today.
In Huglfing in the Weilheim-Schongau district, he runs an organic grassland farm and keeps 45 cows, ponies, sheep and other animals. Shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020, the farmer, who also runs 14 rooms and holiday apartments on his farm near Murnau, had to close the guesthouse. “We had prepared everything, with separate entrances, but we were not allowed to open,” says Schmid. The family business relies two-thirds on rentals and only one-third on agriculture. For him, this meant a loss of sales amounting to several tens of thousands of euros.
Farmers had quickly issued emergency aid
So in spring 2020, like 260,000 other companies in Bavaria, he applied for emergency aid. Farmer Alois Schmid also received his 9,000 euros quickly – and invested it immediately. “We used the money to renovate a vacation home,” says the organic farmer. He would never have thought it possible that he would ever have to pay it back. At the end of 2022, however, he received an email asking him to have his income and expenses checked. It turned out that his “liquidity shortage” was smaller than expected.
Many farmers in Bavaria are in the same situation as him. It is difficult to say exactly how many had to pay back their emergency aid. In response to a BR query, the responsible Ministry of Economic Affairs headed by Hubert Aiwanger (Free Voters) said that an evaluation at industry level was not possible.
Blauer Gockel Association: Holiday farms depend on rentals
Gerda Walser represents 1,400 holiday farms in Bavaria with the Blauer Gockel eV association. She emphasizes that the farmers were dependent on the Corona aid money: “Our farms rent to guests because they need this money, this second source of income, because they can no longer live off farming alone.” In addition, there are other running costs such as electricity and insurance.
According to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, around 120,000 recipients in Bavaria (that’s about half) have now paid back the emergency aid – that’s more than the Germany-wide average. Some of them have already filed a lawsuit against the repayment or applied for a waiver. Was the aid in the Free State perhaps distributed too generously in spring 2020?
Ministry of Economic Affairs: Situation in spring 2020 “completely incalculable”
In response to a BR query, the Ministry of Economic Affairs referred to the “completely incalculable situation” at the time and stated that this had resulted in “some significant deviations from the values forecast when the application was submitted”, which is why “there is now an obligation to repay”.
Corona bridging aid: Further repayments threatened
This is causing a lack of understanding in the Blauer Gockel eV association. Chairwoman Gerda Walser tells BR about companies that had to take out a loan in order to be able to pay back the funding and says: “All in all, that wasn’t entirely fair.”
Alois Schmid from Gut Grasleiten has also now paid the money back. It was not a threat to his livelihood. However, in addition to the immediate aid, he also received bridging aid. Amount: 60,000 euros. Here too, the Free State requested a so-called final invoice. But it is so complex that the Free State has repeatedly extended the submission deadline.
Now it runs until September. This is giving him a headache, because if he has to pay back this aid too, then “things look bad,” says the farmer. But he will have to be patient: the Ministry of Economic Affairs wants to have processed the repayment of the aid money by the end of 2025.
Editor’s note: Initially, we were talking about “Hugling in the Weilheim-Schongau district”. But we actually meant “Huglfing”. We have corrected the typo. Many thanks to a user for pointing this out.
