The price for rapeseed oil is higher than ever. Good news for rapeseed farmers who have united in the east of the Netherlands. But they don’t celebrate too soon. ‘With a hailstorm at the very last minute, sometimes three quarters of the harvest is lost.’
Erik Schieven’s father looked extremely dubious when he heard that his son wanted to grow rapeseed to make salad and cooking oil. “You can’t eat that stuff,” he said firmly. ‘That’s where our lamps burned during the war.’
Rapeseed – recognizable by the yellow flowers that bloom in April and May – was still mainly grown in the Netherlands at the beginning of this century for fuel production. To be mixed with petrol as a sustainable alternative. Due to all kinds of support policies, this was possible for a short time in the small Netherlands, but with the scarcity of land and the disappearance of subsidies for some time now.
In the east of the Netherlands, a group of farmers liked the idea so much that they started a real rapeseed cooperative under the name Colzaco, of which Schieven is currently chairman. A low-quality bulk product such as biofuel may not be profitable, but high-quality oil for the kitchen might be, was their thought. It succeeded, mainly thanks to a German oil press just across the border. He managed to get rid of the bitter taste by ‘peeling’ black rapeseeds.
The yellow gold
The result is bottled on the kitchen table of arable farmer Hans Lammers from Megchelen, Gelderland, one of Colzaco’s cooperative members. ‘Canola oil, Cold Press, Bake & Roast’, is written on the bottle. Lammers and Schieven are visibly proud that their brand under the name Brassica – Latin for cabbage – is now available in all major supermarkets.
With the high raw material prices and the scarcity of sunflower oil due to the war in Ukraine, the rapeseed farmers suddenly seem to have gold in their hands. And farmer’s luck wants Lammers to have enough rapeseed this year, with the world price for rapeseed oil at a peak.
Lammers tempers the euphoria when a term such as ‘yellow gold’ is thrown around the table. ‘I haven’t got my money yet, have I? With a hailstorm at the very last minute, three quarters of the harvest was sometimes lost. And I won’t take it off the land until August, then we’ll see if the price is still right.’
With his full-time job and modest 12 hectares of arable land, hobby farmer Lammers is the personification of the rapeseed sector. A fun activity to add, but it won’t get big anytime soon. This requires a culinary turnaround in Dutch kitchens. A move away from the olive and sunflower oil baking habit. There will also be less space for meat and milk production. Because in order to grow rapeseed on a large scale, animal feed crops such as silage maize (almost 200 thousand hectares) would have to make way for rapeseed.
Such a turnaround will not happen overnight, but corona and the war on the European continent have made it a more realistic scenario. As early as 2013, Wageningen University presented a study into the consequences for the Dutch food supply if the supply of foreign food to the Netherlands were to stop. Rapeseed emerges as the only oil variant that can be grown here on a large scale to provide vegetable proteins.
Omega 3 Omega 6 Ratio
Production is nowhere near that high: since 2013, the cultivated area of rapeseed has steadily decreased from about 3,500 to 1,500 hectares. With the high raw material prices of recent times, cooperative chairman Erik Schieven sees an increase in attention. More and more arable farmers are calling him with questions about the crop and are considering joining Colzaco’s current 120 members.
Above the blooming yellow flowers of Lammers, the insect life is bursting with swallows. Due to the little rain recently, the rapeseed stems are standing in very dry, almost dead soil. It shows the strength of the crop, say Lammers and Schieven. Because the roots go deep into the ground, the crop can do with little water. Rapeseed also improves soil fertility.
Canola oil is also healthier than many competing cooking and salad oils – with 90 percent unsaturated fats and a good omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. This raises the question why Dutch arable farmers are not already gone en masse?
‘Yes, if only it were that simple,’ says Schieven. ‘It is not only difficult for the consumer to get out of the olive oil habit, but also for the farmer to fit rapeseed in between the other crops.’ To prevent diseases, rapeseed cannot be kept on the same hectare for two years in a row, nor before or after sugar beets. The timing – harvest in August, sow in September – is anything but ideal. In fact, rapeseed can only be sown directly on the ground where grain stood the year before. Or the farmer has to accept that part of the land is temporarily fallow.
Schevenen does not want to discourage arable farmers. ‘Everyone is welcome and we guarantee that we will purchase their rapeseed’, he emphasizes. ‘As long as they enjoy working together on a product from the region.’ And more importantly, says Schieven, who is still waist-deep in Lammer’s little sea of yellow flowers: ‘We have laid down in our statutes that all members must have a warm heart for what we call the most beautiful food crop in the world’.