Fourteen recognised occupations covering farming, forestry, horticulture, viticulture, livestock and fisheries. They sit outside both systems the rest of this repo describes.
A third chamber
The skilled trades answer to the Handwerkskammer and the industrial occupations to the IHK. The Grüne Berufe answer to the Landwirtschaftskammer — training supervision, examinations, and equivalence assessment of foreign qualifications.
And only in some Bundesländer. Where no Landwirtschaftskammer exists, a state ministry or Regierungspräsidium is the competent body instead. So this sector combines a third chamber system with the sixteen-state fragmentation seen in Erzieher and Lehrer.
Identify the competent body for your target Bundesland before anything else.
What else is distinctive
- Qualification gates. Applying pesticides commercially requires the Pflanzenschutz-Sachkunde certificate; chainsaw work requires documented training. Neither is implied by the job title, and neither transfers automatically from abroad.
- Seasonal migrant labour. Harvest work runs largely on the 70-day short-term employment rule, social-insurance-free and overwhelmingly staffed from Romania and Poland. It is a structural feature of German agriculture with a documented enforcement record, and it is not the same thing as the qualified occupations profiled here.
- Weather and physical risk are everyday working conditions, not footnotes.
- Public-sector employment is common in forestry, which makes pay tariff-verifiable — unusually for a manual trade.
Profiles
- Landwirt/in
- Forstwirt/in
- Gärtner/in
- Winzer/in
- Tierwirt/in
- Pferdewirt/in
- Fachkraft Agrarservice
- Fischwirt/in
- Hauswirtschafter/in
Professions in this category
- Fachkraft Agrarservice (Agricultural Contracting Technician) The contractor side of agriculture, and the part nobody outside the sector sees.
- Fischwirt/in (Fisheries and Aquaculture Worker) The smallest occupation in this repo, and split into two halves moving in opposite directions: aquaculture, which is short of qualified people, and coastal fishing, which is being ended by quota.
- Forstwirt/in (Forest Worker) Fells, plants and tends forest.
- Gärtner/in (Horticulturist / Landscape Gardener) Seven Fachrichtungen under one job title, and they are not variations on a theme — the largest, Garten- und Landschaftsbau, is a construction trade in all but name and is booming on urban greening and climate adaptation, while the production Fachrichtungen are under real pressure from imports and energy costs.
- Hauswirtschafter/in (Home Economics / Institutional Housekeeping) Formally one of the Grüne Berufe, and almost nobody who holds it works on a farm.
- Landwirt/in (Farmer / Agricultural Worker) The anchor file for the Grüne Berufe, and the one place in this repo where a whole labour model has to be described alongside the profession: the 70-day rule, which makes German harvest work social-insurance-free, is staffed overwhelmingly from Romania and Poland, and has a documented enforcement and exploitation record.
- Pferdewirt/in (Equine Professional) This is the file where the repo’s honesty convention matters most.
- Tierwirt/in (Livestock Farmer) Five Fachrichtungen under one qualification, and they range from industrial-scale dairy and poultry units to Schäferei — a subsidised, culturally protected occupation with a few hundred full-time practitioners, and one of the genuine edge cases in this repo.
- Winzer/in (Winegrower) Viticulture and cellar work in one qualification, concentrated in a handful of Bundesländer, and run overwhelmingly on family succession.