Things looked bleak for Hendrik Jan ten Cate’s carrots. The soil in which they have been planted since Easter had completely dried out last Friday. In the bright sun he bent over the clay soil and let a handful of clay crumble between his fingers. “Look at those tiny, delicate roots. They have nothing to grow on.” The intention is for the soil to produce large carrots in five months, for Dutch and Belgian supermarkets.
But last weekend, after four weeks of drought, it rained in Tholen in Zeeland. “18 mm,” Ten Cate texted on Monday morning. “Very welcome.” A few million carrots have been saved for the time being – they can still take root well now that the top layer of soil is wet enough.
April was “exceptionally dry,” according to the KNMI, and the south-west of the Netherlands was the driest. Not that Ten Cate was surprised. Arable farmers in the Netherlands have been noticing for about twenty years that the climate is slowly but surely changing. Spring is drier, the rest of the year increasingly wetter. In 2024, it rained so hard in April and May that many Dutch farmers saw their crops fail.
Since 2010, they have been able to take out ‘broad weather insurance’ for damage caused by extreme weather conditions. The government provides a subsidy for this. Until 2022, 2,450 companies used such insurance, 15 percent of eligible arable farmers.
In recent months, a strong easterly blew on Tholen, which affected Ten Cate’s young crops. The wind carried away the top layers of soil, causing the seeds to be lost. The farmer prefers a westerly wind, because it brings dew that his plants “do very well on.” The Ten Cate family has one hundred hectares, full of onions, carrots, potatoes, sugar beets, wheat and grass. Seeds from that grass are used for lawns and football fields. Six days a week, except on Sundays, he and his wife and several self-employed people work on the farm. And sometimes, when a huge amount of weeding needs to be done quickly, his teenage daughter’s soccer team comes to help.
Potato field during a dry period near Tholen.
Photo Walter Autumn
Pumping water from the lake
Ten Cate has become a water management expert in his 24 years as a farmer. He has now been director of ‘soil and water’ for five years at agricultural organization ZLTO, which includes 13,000 farmers from Zeeland, North Brabant and South Gelderland. In the entire Dutch coastal strip, he says, the groundwater is too salty. Dry springs make this worse. That is why farmers have invested in basins and irrigation systems, and since last year they have been pumping fresh water from the Volkerak-Zoommeer into the ditches at Tholen. Ten Cate, together with the water board, lobbied for this for twelve years. The lake has become fresh since 1987, when it was closed off from the Oosterschelde. But pumps could not be installed at first because ‘The Hague’ wanted to salinize the lake again in the fight against the blue-green algae bacteria. In 2020, the House of Representatives canceled that plan. The lake has remained fresh and the water can therefore go to the Thoolse ditches. Blue-green algae is still there.
Ten Cate had to persuade all 240 farmers on Tholen to help pay for the pumping. That worked, he says. They now have access to three classes of water, depending on where their farm is located. For ‘good’ water you pay 60 euros per hectare, for ‘medium good’ (slightly saltier) it is 40 euros and for ‘bad’ (quite salty) water it is 20 euros per hectare. The farmer pays this extra tax annually to the water board.
Reuse water
Ten Cate’s latest project is to get used water from factories to farmers so that they can ‘irrigate’ their land with it. For example, the Coroos canning factory in Kapelle uses a lot of water to wash jars. The farmers now use that water to spray. North Brabant has had the ‘Farmer Beer Water’ project for a few years now, in which rinse water from Bavaria’s beer bottles goes to agriculture.
Ten Cate is now working with the water boards to purify sewage water in such a way that it can be used by farmers. “The main problem is medicine residues. These have to be removed before you can use that water.” But in principle, he says, in the Netherlands “so much water is wasted that we can reuse it.”
And then there are the crops themselves. Ten Cate and his colleagues expect a lot from breeding, in which varieties are crossed to make better ones, and the genetic editing technique crispr-cas. Scientists from Wageningen University are conducting research into many new species that are better able to withstand diseases and drought. However, it usually takes fifteen years, says Ten Cate, before a plant variety is made into a more resilient variety through crossing. With crispr-cas it can be done faster. Ten Cate: “We hope that in five years there will be new varieties that require much less water to grow.”
He is not pessimistic about agriculture, despite climate change. “We know a lot about Dutch agriculture, and as a result we have always been able to adapt to new circumstances.”
Remnants of the potato harvest in the barn of farmer Hendrik Jan ten Cate.
Photo Walter Autumn
