Grazing cows have always fascinated me. I grew up with that image: as soon as I cycled out of the city, I saw a horizon, grass and grazing cows. This image is engraved with me, and with many other Dutch people, as a coherent whole of ruralness, vastness, nature and tranquility.
The landscape has no recreational significance for the livestock that graze there and for their owners, the farmers.
Grazing is related to: producing milk and meat. Pastures don’t exist until cows walk in them. It is the grazing itself that keeps the landscape open and gives rise to the meadows. In recent decades, grazing in the Netherlands has been increasingly taken over by machines: the land was mowed, the cows were fed in the barn. The cows were fed grass silage, but also maize and soya. Protein-rich milk production increased.
What I find fascinating about a meadow is that it resembles a blank page, a sheet of white paper. The moment the cows come to graze there, they fill it in like a notebook or drawing, with their diversity of movements.
Those movement patterns fascinate me. Last weeks Ivar van Bekkum and I made a new series of grazing choreography drawings. We record the grazing patterns of cows on these drawings, as a kind of human and subjective GPS.
I wish that our work would inspire us to view the rural area more from a mobility and cohesion point of view. The manure surpluses can be viewed in another way: the initial cycle of food, manure, crop, grazing or cultivation, food, manure, etc. has been broken with the arrival of fertilizers, which are added to that cycle. These fertilizers are nutrients, which are added but no longer captured anywhere. The system is now bursting at the seams. The landscape is suffering from obesity, as it were. That which at first seemed so wonderful: sufficient vigor for the crop to feed humans and livestock, is now going to suffocate the earth. First the farmlands, then the adjacent natural areas, then the rest of the land and finally the oceans. So what does reducing livestock in specific locations actually solve? The world doesn’t go on a diet. The flow of unrecycled human and animal poop continues to suffocate the world. Nitrogen policy mainly produces an unsolvable political problem with the impeachment of the agricultural sector.
In the meantime, we continue to draw, to continue to view our constantly changing landscape with patience, curiosity and attention.
On display in Museum IJsselstein from July 16 to September 25, 2022