Chocolate, punctuality, and Farmers’ Golf, Switzerland’s traditional sport

In Switzerland, there is a unique sport called ‘Hornussen’ or ‘Farmers’ golf’. This is a team sport that players usually learn from their parents and grandparents and is very popular in this country. The farmers’ golf is a perfect combination of sports and tradition. There are different versions as to where and how Hornussen was born. Some say that it started in the Italian region of Switzerland where farmers used to practice certain pastimes similar to what we know today as ‘Farmers’ sport’.

Other versions place this sport’s origins in the Emmental region in the 19th century. This is because the famous Swiss writer, Jeremias Gotthelf, mentions it in his novel ‘Uli der Knecht’. A third version suggests that this might have started as a war training designed to hit the enemy. Today, Hornussen is popular in the German-speaking countryside of Switzerland and has over 171 registered clubs.

The Swiss art of Hornussen

Being Roger Federer’s country, one may expect Switzerland’s most traditional sport to be closely related to tennis. The truth is that it has been compared to tennis and other sports such as baseball, with its own long history of odd and unexpected mishaps, and traditional golf, the game that has inspired so much rueful humor, but it’s actually one-of-a-kind. Unlike other strange sports such as Zorbing, like we can see in the video below, the batting technique is quite similar to the one used in golf. Yet, this Swiss sport presents some distinctive qualities.

How farmers’ golf is played

Farmers’ golf, often called Bauerngolf, belongs to the same broad family of countryside leisure games that took shape in rural Alpine and Dutch-German communities. The basic idea is simple enough to grasp at a glance: a heavy ball, usually made of solid rubber or stitched leather, is struck with a sturdy wooden bat or club and sent travelling across open farmland toward a chosen target. That target is rarely a manicured hole. More often it is an everyday object borrowed from the working farm, such as an upturned bucket, an old tyre, or a marked patch of ground, and the aim is to reach it in as few strikes as possible.

The terrain itself is the defining feature. Rather than the trimmed fairways and greens of the conventional sport, players cross meadows, pastures, and grazing land exactly as they find them. The thick rubber or leather ball is well suited to this uneven ground because it can be lofted or rolled over tufts of grass, mud, and gentle slopes without the precision a polished course would demand. A round may wind past ditches, stone walls, wire fences, and fields still holding livestock, so reading the lie of the land and choosing a sensible line matters as much as raw striking power.

A relaxed and social countryside game

Where the conventional sport prizes etiquette, dress codes, and quiet concentration, farmers’ golf leans firmly toward the relaxed and the communal. It grew up as a pastime for people who already spent their days on the land, and that easygoing spirit still shapes it. Courses are improvised across whatever fields are available, obstacles are accepted as part of the fun rather than engineered away, and the scoring stays loose enough that newcomers and seasoned players can share the same outing without anyone feeling out of place.

For that reason the game is most at home at village festivals, harvest gatherings, and family get-togethers, where it sits comfortably alongside food, music, and conversation. The cheerful, slightly chaotic character it shares with many other unusual pastimes that people take up purely for the love of the game is a large part of its appeal. The equipment is cheap and forgiving, the rules bend to suit the group, and the open countryside doubles as both the playing field and the gathering place, which is precisely why farmers’ golf has endured as a friendly rural tradition rather than a tightly governed competitive sport.