Caroline van der Plas was very annoyed with fellow guest Harm Edens at Eva Jinek’s talk show table last night. “That is complete nonsense what you are talking about!”
Where Caroline van der Plas has the image of a kind of pleasant farmer’s wife, Harm Edens is more or less her opposite. That’s a bit of the nag stocking that you really don’t want on your birthday. He is angry with everything and everyone that has a little joie de vivre in it. Do you eat strawberries in November? Then he’s angry. Going on vacation to Cancún? Also angry.
Dead bottom
It is therefore not surprising that Harm was at the talk show table by Eva Jinek went wild against farmer’s friend Caroline. She is annoyed by people who portray farmers as a kind of nature barbarians. “People forget: the farmers work with nature every day. The rest of the population works in cities and drives on roads.”
Farmers are not destroyers of nature, according to Caroline. “When you come to farms… The stables are full of swallows, of insects. If a farmer is currently working in his field and he is plowing or manuring, the whole meadow will be full of crows and seagulls. A dead soil, nothing grows on it, right?”
Complete nonsense
Harm thinks that farmers do kill the soil. “They also put a lot of water and fertilizers in there to get it going again, don’t they? It is generally known that the soil is fairly dead.”
What ignorance, thinks Caroline. “That is complete nonsense what you are talking about. Nothing grows on dead soil. If my garden is dead, nothing will grow.”
Harm: “No, and if you put some plastic in it, something will grow again.”
‘Then it stops’
Caroline has the idea that Harm doesn’t understand how it works. “Well, that’s just nonsense. You always need fertilizers. That is a valuable nutrient for the soil. The whole of the Netherlands has a garden and they buy fertilizers to fertilize their garden because they know that crops do not only grow on sunlight and water.”
It is a misconception that fertilizers are meant to bring dead soil back to life, according to Caroline. “They think that…” She swallows her words: “Yes, sorry, then it ends.”
‘I invite you’
Harm wishes Caroline good luck with the election, but hopes she won’t get too big. “Together, we need a new agriculture quickly, as far as I’m concerned. This also means that we will grow other things. If you now have 200 dairy cows, can’t you just get rid of 100 and do completely different things?”
Caroline then starts laughing. Harm: “I would like to be in your podcast!” Caroline: “Well, I invite you here. That’s what we are going to do.”
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