Despite the bad news of 2009, Stefan Poienaru remains optimistic: he invested more in raw material and worked the land more efficiently than in previous years to offset the decline in turnover next year. "Those who did not have such a positive approach will go through two bad years in a row and prolong the ailment," Poienaru says. "We must not skimp on technology - with proper technology you get good results; if the weather helps, too, you get outstanding results," the businessman says.

Stefan Poienaru, however, is one of the few farmers who can afford to make such calculations. Most of the arable land in the country is worked by small farmers and subsistence farming accounts for more than 90% of the farms. There are but a handful of people to have amassed a lot of farming land: Stefan Poienaru, Culita Tarata, Ioan Niculae, Adrian Porumboiu and Mihai Anghel own 200,000 hectares of the cultivated area of the country, that is about 2%.

As far as Poienaru is concerned, he evaluates his business at 15-16 million euros this year, compared with 26 million euros last year, with a 7% profitability (about 1.9 million euros). The year 2009 came with a series of bad news: on the one hand, production stood at 35% of last year's harvest, drought affected the crops, and the losses caused by disasters are put at some three million euros. Grain prices have not helped farmers, either, as they went down by about 20% compared with last year to 0.4 RON/kilogram, while the sunflower price fell 30% to 0.7 RON/kilogram. Actually, companies in this business said 2009 was the worst year for Romanian agriculture.

Many are blaming the severe fragmentation of plots of land after 1990. About 60-70% of the total farming land is fragmented into tiny bits "and there is no profitability (in it i.e.)" says Mihai Anghel, the owner of Cerealcom Dolj. He adds that the potential of the Romanian agriculture is to feed 80 million people. "I don't want as much land as I have now. I for one do not believe in the future of big farms," Stefan Poienaru says. The agriculture model he sees for Romania is that of a small plot of land, worked by a family, where owners know exactly what resources they used and reap the benefits of their work in full.