In the Gelderse Stroe, the adders are everywhere under the grass

Anyone who sees the nitrogen conflict as a civil war in the making, think of ChristenUnie leader Segers, could see the Heetkampweg in Stroe as the first front line. Two weeks ago it was full of tractors, collected on the land of dairy farmer Brouwer and a few neighbours. A few meters from his yard, brown Staatsbosbeheer signs indicate that a different world begins here. A world in which not the tractor, but the holiday maker is in charge. Where, with the noise of the A1 and the railway as a sound backdrop, nature begins.

A piece of forest the size of a newspaper, that’s how you can muse, with the poet JC Bloem. But nature it is nonetheless, legally protected by both the Birds Directive and the Habitats Directive. Natura2000 area, in short, about which the Council of State ruled inexorably in the summer of 2019 that no more grammes of nitrogen could be added.

Also see The most impressive images of the national farmer’s protest this Monday

While the usual e-bike couples race past this Tuesday and two girls take pictures of each other on a sandy hill, 35-year-old Richard (“prefer not to have a last name”) from Arnhem is wandering around. “As soon as I have a few hours off, I’ll go,” he says, his camera dangling around his waist. “The wet heath here makes it one of the few areas in the Netherlands where you can find the adder.” His eyes scan the bottom. “I’m looking for a viper in the grass, yes,” he laughs, after which he continues on his way.

The night before, a thousand farmers and other entrepreneurs in Barneveld, the municipality to which Stroe belongs, were also looking for vipers in the grass, albeit of the more political kind. In less than ten days, four local entrepreneurs set up a foundation – Vision SME – and an event – ​​Nitrogen Facts – from the ground up. They want to unite agricultural, construction and transport entrepreneurs from the region and together they ‘broadcast a sound’ to politicians.

“After the farmers took action, we looked at each other as entrepreneurs and we felt: it is time for something constructive.” They want to spread “the honest story” about nitrogen. That story appears to consist mainly of question marks about the story of the cabinet.

“Who’s next?”

“Isn’t the cure worse than the disease?” one wonders. “We used to have the asbestos ban, the government came back to that later. Could it be better with nitrogen?”, asks the other. “Now it’s the farmers, who’s next?”, a third speaker expresses the fear of many.

31 percent of those present say they are angry about the announced nitrogen measures via the large ‘talk-in screen’, 37 percent are disappointed and another 24 percent feel insecure. Only 2 percent feel “pretty okay” about it, 6 percent are holding back. When asked how they are doing, the room loudly bellows “mooooo”.

The evening thus acquires an almost therapeutic character. Chairman of the day Rens de Jong asks those present to talk to their neighbour. The first part of the program consists of ‘letting off steam’, in which visitors can have their say into a microphone that he throws into the hall.

“Is not the remedy worse than the disease?”

“Look, we broadly agree about the dot on the horizon,” says Bert Roordink (50) of Roordink Bedrijfswagens, over a slice of carrot cake and a cup of coffee. “Nature must be protected, period. But in the Netherlands, especially in the region, you have to take people there. We are here for consultation and mutual trust. But these measures, they are just poured out on us.”

Read also Farmers hardly seem to be interested in buy-out schemes, why is that?

There is here in the Food Valleyas part of the Gelderse Vallei presents itself, “so much knowledge and innovation”, his colleague Bram de Jong adds, but his feeling is, “nothing is being done with it.”

Other than adders in the grass – isn’t nitrogen a stick to beat farmers with so that new homes can be built? – the entrepreneurs gathered are presented with the necessary ways to prevent the approaching nitrogen measures after all. Researcher Geesje Rotgers of the Agrifacts foundation wants to be able to ‘first measure the well-being of ‘all eighty thousand, and I mean all’ endangered species. The undisputed star of the evening, Caroline van der Plas of the BoerBurgerBeweging, wants to ‘certainly’ want to protect nature, ‘but why does it have to be nature from 1992, when Natura 2000 was conceived? Will we still be doing that in 2500?” In eight minutes, Wageningen professor emeritus Johan Sanders fires eight ways at the public to increase ‘nitrogen efficiency’, without the livestock having to shrink. He is thinking, for example, of splitting grasses so that cattle with less food ingest more protein and produce less manure.

The Gelderland deputy Peter Drenth (CDA) does indeed support the need for measures, but from the podium denounces the cabinet’s nitrogen map on which almost the entire Gelderland valley was colored ‘baby pink’, the color that represents a 58 percent nitrogen reduction. “The minister should never have used that card,” he says. Don’t be fooled, the driver swears, “Gelderland has long been on the way to achieving the nitrogen targets”. He believes that “mobilizing the innovative power that lives among you” will keep the specter of compulsory expropriated farms out of his province.

It sounds like a statement of faith. From reporting in NRC it turned out this Wednesday that ‘not a single’ farmer wants to make use of the improved provincial buy-out arrangement. The application period ends in September. The Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) fears that expropriations will become unavoidable in this way.

Chanterelles

Meanwhile, on the ‘front line’, near the Heetkampweg in Stroe, things are changing. Last Monday afternoon, some farmers drove on tractors through the adjacent nature reserve to Radio Kootwijk. After only a few hundred meters they made a stop where they milled part of the terrain with agricultural equipment and then filled it with grass seed and manure. “You can smell that,” says the stunned forester Laurens Jansen when he inspects the damage on the spot the day after. He shows a slow worm, a legless lizard that did not survive the incident.

You’re a ox if you stunt with farmers, wrote a child on a road sign

Jansen swallows his anger and does not want to escalate: “It was just a depot, where we kept wood chips that we have used elsewhere. And luckily they didn’t destroy anything in Radio Kootwijk. After consultation, they left it at that with some proud photos.”

Two weeks after the protests on farmer Brouwer’s land, Stroe is still covered with posters, banners and inverted Dutch flags. “You’re a cow if you stunt with farmers,” one child wrote on a road sign. A woman on the terrace of café de Landing has tied a farmer’s scarf to her handbag.

On the same terrace, local resident Eveline Bernard (71) shoots the reporter. She tells what it is like to have a different sound than the peasant gospel here. “That’s having guts,” she says. “Then it suddenly becomes a lot less fun in the neighborhood WhatsApp group.” She regularly objects to farmers who violate local environmental rules and regulations. That produces the necessary crooked faces.

Yet she does not operate entirely alone. With more than twenty others she founded Kootwijk Groen, a network of nature lovers from the area. She herself lives next to a sand drift, which in her youth was still “the largest stretch of desert in northwestern Europe.” A little later, on the veranda of her forest house, she takes out a photo album. Photos from the 1960s show a vast expanse of sand. “The arrival of the highway and later intensive livestock farming has made things grassy here,” she says, showing how the plain is now – almost completely grassed. “Feel for yourself,” she says, “the sand is so dry here that it slips out of your hand like water. Only through extreme fertilization can something grow here.”

According to her, the attitude in this region is that you do something first and only then ask for permission from the government. “I call it the nibble-and-talk method: first grab what seems nice and then chat until you get the new rights.” The fact that the government now seems to be setting a limit is new and difficult for many of them to digest, she notes.

She saw the nature in her living environment change since the 1960s. “As a child I looked for chanterelles here, they loved the trees here. The broad-leafed wasp orchid, an orchid, has also recently disappeared.” Yet she views the farmers in her neighborhood with empathy. “When these people came to live here, it was considered a victory if you managed to bend nature to your will. Those values ​​are still there.”

Farmers have fallen into a trap, she says. “The bank told them to expand every year, to get bigger profits. Of course you feel cheated if it turns out that this was not possible at all.” Well, she sighs, “maybe they’re mad at themselves too.”