You can no longer look around the inverted Dutch flag. Everywhere you look, the flag is hanging in the city, along highways and of course at farms. In ancient times, a ship in distress flew an inverted flag. What is the need now, who hangs those flags? NH Nieuws made a tour of the province, looking for the faces behind the flag. Today we are talking to farmer Jos Stuijt from Wijdewormer. Jos hung up a flag because he is afraid of the future.
We see the inverted Dutch flag everywhere, but it appeared for the first time months ago as an expression of farmers’ protest.
“They take away the land that we have saved for years, built up, worked for”
A real farmer should not be missing in our list of North Holland faces behind the inverted flag. We talk to Jos Stuijt, 62, a cattle farmer in Wijdewormer who has grown considerably with his company in recent years. About three hundred dairy cows live in his state-of-the-art barn, for which he borrowed more than a million from the bank.
He has two successors ready to take over the farming business, but he is hesitant to do so now that the future of his business is uncertain.
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Farmer Jos from Wijdewormer about the inverted flag – NH Nieuws
Jos becomes emotional when he has to explain why he decided to turn the flag, when he looks out over his ground he feels the pain: “The country we have saved for years, built up, worked for, they take away”, says Jos after a long silence. He is referring to the impending forced buyout of large dairy farmers in order to reduce nitrogen emissions.
Jos continues to fight for his conviction that farmers are being hit too hard by the proposed nitrogen measures. He finds the injustice intolerable and that is why he has not one, but even three inverted Dutch flags hanging on his property.
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