Arable farmers Kees de Koning (71) and Michael Schippers (54) peer through the window of the dusty pick-up truck. Driving at walking pace, they see the bone-dry plots of their arable farm in Kamperland, on Noord-Beveland in Zeeland. The alfalfa plants – intended for animal feed – on the left are dry and yellow, on the right the leaves of the potato plants hang down brown and limp. White flowers appear here and there, but that doesn’t offer much hope. ‘They bloom with misery,’ says Schippers.
Zeeland is surrounded by water, yet it has the dubious honor of being the driest province in the Netherlands. In the past four months, the least precipitation in the entire country fell here, according to data from the KNMI. The water in the inlets, the ditches and the bottom is salty and therefore harmful to some plants and crops. Fresh water barely reaches the province. There are no rivers and not everywhere are sweet groundwater bubbles in the ground. The fresh water that is there, for example rainwater that has been retained, has evaporated rapidly since the spring due to the heat.
Irrigation with fresh water is therefore not possible. This makes the 350 hectares of land belonging to Nieuw Campen, the company of which De Koning and Schippers are co-owners, completely dependent on rain. And there is 300 millimeters too little of that this year, De Koning sees on the app on his phone that keeps track of the water level. It is disastrous for wheat, onions, sugar beet, potatoes, flax, summer rapeseed, alfalfa and grass seed, the crops that Zeeland farmers grow.
no foliage
The onions and potatoes in particular suffer from the drought, says De Koning. ‘It hardly rained in the spring, so the plants have not developed any foliage. Without the shadow of the leaf they are cooking.’
Do farmers keep their fingers crossed every day for a sudden cloudburst to save the harvest? No, says Michael Schippers. ‘At this stage it is more favorable if it remains dry. If a lot of water falls now, the potatoes go through a gigantic growth spurt. Then they become water tubers with brown spots. Nobody wants to eat such fries.’
Normally the farmers of Nieuw Campen harvest 50 thousand kilos of potatoes. ‘In this problematic year we can deduct at least 10,000 from that,’ says De Koning, who manages the administration. ‘This could be beneficial for some farmers because the price of scarce products is rising. But we are tied to contracts. Our turnover is therefore lower anyway.’
‘Every drop counts now’, says Janneke La Gasse, spokesperson for the Scheldestromen water board, which deals with water management in the province. The situation is currently more extreme than in the historically dry year of 1976. That is why, for the first time in ten years, the extraction of ditch water in the province has been banned. Unconventional measures are being taken to protect the vulnerable peat against the salt water that comes up from the soil as seepage: treated sewage water must keep the subsoil wet where it can.
By retaining more water in the winter, the water board and Natuurmonumenten have already tried to prepare for the drought. It turned out not to be enough. The water levels must therefore be structurally higher, believes Wouter Stempher, forester at Natuurmonumenten. This may be disadvantageous for farmers at the start of the season, because they can go onto the land later because their tractors sink into the wet earth. But later in the season they take advantage of it. ‘If you see what the drought damage is now, also for nature and the birds, it is enormous.’
Other crops
In this coastal province, where there is a lot of arable farming due to the fertile clay soil, farmers are also looking for solutions themselves for the more extreme drought. Some grow other crops that require less moisture, such as field beans. Others invest in innovative water systems, in which a computer closely monitors that each plant gets enough water, while as little water as possible is wasted.
When the crops of Michael Schippers and Kees de Koning also threatened to die a few years ago, they let a truck full of water from West Brabant. The operation cost ‘claws with money’. But a cornered cat makes strange jumps – or rather: ‘If your crop is wasted, you will do crazy things.’
But the costs did not outweigh the revenue, says De Koning. Now they have set their sights on the construction of a water basin. The land is enclosed between an industrial estate and a camping site. The rainwater that falls there now disappears unused into the salty ditches, but – if a pot of money becomes available – it can provide the potatoes with water in the future with a collection and pipe system.
sober people
Other sustainable ways to combat drought are being investigated at the Rusthoeve experimental farm in Colijnsplaat. With the support of the province and farmers’ organisations, they are looking, for example, at how crops can become more resistant to salt. ‘You can see that these changing circumstances also drive innovations,’ says Erik Martens of the Southern Agriculture and Horticulture Organization. ‘Zeelanders remain sober people. They’re looking for ways to deal with it, instead of shouting woe and woe.’
Years ago, Schippers fled the unfavorable weather conditions in Zeeland by going to work in Canada. But after a year and a half he was back, despite the large amount of fresh water available there to irrigate the crops. ‘My roots are here’, he says. “Besides, I had to get out of bed at 4 a.m. to switch off that smallpox spray.”
The ability to put things into perspective is vital for a farmer in Zeeland, says Schippers. ‘Otherwise you won’t last. We’re not going to sit back and think about it. If necessary, we will grow oranges.’