Already at the age of twelve he traded in sheep, so began his career as a farmer for the French baron van Verschuer. What helped was the place where he was born and grew up: the Mariënwaerdt estate in the Betuwe, 600 hectares of agricultural land and 300 nature, family property for centuries.
High school was “not his thing, he only blossomed during a four-year agricultural education in Chester, England. He then did internships at dairy farms in England and New Zealand.” That says Nathalie des Tombe, who met Van Verschuer in 1993 “during a girlfriend trip from Amsterdam. One of us knew Frans and had arranged for us to watch the milking early in the morning. We had started a think tank and wanted to offer a platform for the marketing of artisanal and regional products from farms.”
This led to a multi-day outdoor fair at Mariënwaerdt in 1994 with thousands of visitors and the beginning of something between Frans and Nathalie. Nathalie: “Doing it with those friends was a lot of fun, but they went back to their jobs after that. Frans said: I want to do it again, but with you.”
Under the leadership of Frans and Nathalie, who married in 1995 and had three children, an uninterrupted series of Landgoedfairs started on Mariënwaerdt. Five days of activities with horses, traditional agricultural products, food trucks, live music, workshops, and anything else that can help strengthen the bond between citizen and farmland.
As early as 1982 Frans had taken over one of Mariënwaerdt’s sixteen tenancy farms, a few decades later he had almost all of them – and 200 employees. In 1999 the estate switched to organic farming. After that it went fast, with an estate shop, a restaurant, a bed & breakfast run by sister Lotje, an annual Christmas fair and the Estate Fair. Mariënwaerdt became a household name among Labrador and wax coat-loving Netherlands and now attracts 300,000 visitors a year. Omroep Max made a twenty-part TV series in 2021 In the heart of our estate which Mariënwaerdt anchored in the canon of the countryside.
Hard with a quip
Frans van Verschuer loved to hunt, well-trained hunting dogs, old Landrovers. He recently restored the Aeltjea tjalk from 1908. Nathalie: “If he didn’t have an appointment, he worked on it, he came back with a pitch black face.”
What drove him, together with his wife, to develop the estate into something so remarkable? Idealism to offer gardenless fellow countrymen rural experiences? His brother Bernard puts that aside. “Our parents were not very business-like. My father thought up all kinds of things – but Frans could also execute it, that was his great talent: turning an idea into reality.”
His longing for tradition played in the background. “He was president of the church council of Beesd for twenty years. He didn’t think theology was that important, but that you have to make something of it together.” Nathalie: “I don’t think he believed in life after death, but he was very involved in the church. His parents and ancestors were also on the church council.” His friend Peter Arensman: “From Frans I learned that traditions never arise by chance.”
According to Arensman, his hobby was managing organizations: Mariënwaerdt, the church, the Maatschappij van Welstand and more. “He wanted to use his knowledge for society, but it was not a sacrifice: he liked to talk and when people listened to him. He wasn’t dominant, although you could be intimidated if you didn’t know him. He could hit the table with his fist.”
He did this in 2009 by co-founding the Land Owners Equal Rights Association, which believes that acquiring land by the government and supplying it free of charge to Natuurmonumenten and provincial landscapes is a distortion of competition for private landowners. Around 2014, Van Verschuer calculated that Natuurmonumenten and the landscapes two billion euros of ‘prohibited state aid’.
That equality was partially achieved. Jurjen Moorman, project leader land affairs of the Nature Program of the province of Gelderland, often sat opposite Van Verschuer. “At one point we had fifty hectares available to turn into nature, close to Mariënwaerdt. Frans wanted to have it, but then I said: Frans, you were at the forefront of equality. This means that we now also have to offer that land to other private individuals. I saw him smile so much, he understood. I have come across few estate owners with whom I could arrange things so pleasantly and on a large scale. He knew a lot about nature development, including land negotiations, and he was in the Lease Room. The province has even used him for a large nature development project to conduct living room discussions with the local owners. He had a large network and came in everywhere.”
His sense of humor helped in this. What helped keep the work from growing over his head was to procrastinate. Bernard: “If it got too much for him, he just parked things, which is also a skillful way to deal with work pressure.” He always remained pragmatic, also in his contacts. Nathalie: „And he was of long-term friendships, but not of close friendships or best friends. He was more of friends for certain things.”
Working on the estate was sometimes risky. After a storm in February, Van Verschuer was unsecured on the roof to replace the tiles. Nathalie: “I told him not to do that anymore. He was never afraid, but I always thought that maybe one day something might happen to him.”
On June 19, while working on his self-built carport, he fell down a kitchen staircase. An operation did not help, he died the next day. Above his obituary was a text from Ecclesiastes 3 to which he had affixed a yellow sticker: For everything that happens there is an hour, a time for everything that is under heaven.
Brother Bernard, who has been retired as a minister since May, said at the funeral about the moment of death: ‘In the midst of that silence and in that great sadness I thought, I also believed that it was a leap into freedom. Out of time into eternity, into the hands of the living God.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 24, 2022