The brewery keeps the fields wet with its waste water

The first leaves of chicory are barely perceptible to the naked eye, the plant has so much trouble growing this spring on the fields of the De Krakenburg farm in Olen, a hamlet to the northeast of Eindhoven. “We are considering whether we should irrigate,” says farmer Kees Huijbers. That costs a lot of money. His father Lex: “One shower would be enough.”

It hasn’t rained for a long time on the high sandy soils in eastern Brabant – just like in the rest of the country. There is no panic yet, but Dutch water managers are gradually becoming very concerned about the drought, which has been going on for about two months now. The so-called precipitation deficit, the difference between evaporation and precipitation, is increasing strongly and amounts to approximately one hundred millimeters. That is a level that occurs once every twenty years.

Farmland and natural land are drying out at a rapid pace, especially in the higher parts of the southern and eastern Netherlands. And it seemed to be going so well. After three dry summers, the groundwater level in almost the whole of the Netherlands had dropped far, until luckily it rained again last year and the level was back to normal at the end of the winter. Until the drought started again in March.

Hundreds of ways

There are hundreds of ways to combat the drought and its effects. One of these is what father and son Huijbers from Olen have been doing for a few years now: they irrigate the crops on their fields with water from the area. In their case, this is treated waste water from beer brewer Bavaria. This normally discharged this into a stream a few kilometers away, but now into an underground pipe, which then flows to ninety centimeters deep pipes in the fields and keeps the soil wet. Lex Huijbers: „A few people from the brewery and the farmers used to sit and have a beer and together they concluded that it was actually very strange that all that water was brought to sea so quickly. That is how the idea arose to use that water for agriculture.”

According to a rough estimate, the entrepreneurs who, in addition to growing crops, also run a nursery, a care farm and an inn, receive about five hundred cubic meters of water per day with a European subsidy, which ensures a higher and therefore stable groundwater level. Elsewhere on their land, the groundwater even occasionally rises so strongly that it causes nuisance. “I once planted trees in the playground of the nursery, and those trees simply drifted away,” says Kees Huijbers.

Also read: The growing season is still young, but where is the rain?

He has been able to regulate the water level via an app on his phone for several weeks now. The fact that the chicory is still so thin is because the roots can’t reach the abundantly available water, high in the soil, just yet. It is almost inevitable that soon the plants will benefit from what is called ‘level-controlled drainage’ in the jargon of water managers.

During previous dry summers, they successively grew sugar beet, barley and maize on their ten hectares of land and that went well. They extracted nineteen tons of dry matter per hectare from the land. Lex Huijbers: „A third more maize for silage than normal. We had never achieved that. While the costs are the same. It is not for nothing that we are so enthusiastic about this.” It is therefore logical that more and more farmers are interested in the former process water of the brewer.

Achterhoek and Twente

During the three dry summers of 2018, 2019 and 2020, the Achterhoek and Twente were hit hardest. Nowhere was it drier than there. Water managers from the east of the country have been busy in recent years to prevent the consequences of drought in the future. It doesn’t take that much effort anymore to convince farmers to cooperate, says Wim Wassink, because the damage caused by drought is many times greater for agriculture than the damage caused by flooding. “In the past, farmers reasoned that they could throw away their crops in wet weather and irrigate in dry season. But nowadays you can often no longer irrigate.”

Wassink coordinates the freshwater supply in the eastern Netherlands and walks in the Overijssel village of Enter, in the west of Twente, to the banks of the Regge. The river used to flow straight through the landscape here a few years ago, but now meanders through it idyllically, narrower, and with many shallow bends. As a result, the river water flows less quickly towards the Vecht and from there to the IJsselmeer, and it stays in the area longer – raising the groundwater level to a few kilometers on both sides of the banks.

The ‘shoaling and re-meandering’ of the Regge, to once again dive into the water jargon, is one of 150 projects carried out over the past six years to cope with the drought in the area. These are sometimes complicated and expensive interventions, such as with the Regge. Which has also happened: in more places water from larger bodies of water, such as the Twente Canal. In addition, many ditches have been closed on farmland and in nature, so that the rainwater that has fallen does not immediately run off. In many cities, rainwater no longer disappears into the sewer system, but is infiltrated into the soil.

And what has also helped in the current drought is that many water authorities have set the water levels much higher than the Netherlands is used to. Rivers, waterways and canals are quite full, and those who do not know better would think that the drought will not be too bad. In reality, the waters are temporarily full in an attempt to hold the water for as long as possible. Wassink: „Ten years ago the mindset: oh, we have a lot of water, let’s get rid of it.”

This is called flexible water level management. And for the time being that is also possible, because there will still be enough water flowing through the major rivers from abroad into the Netherlands this spring.

Also read: Again it is too dry. What are we going to do about it?

Of course there is a limit to combating drought, because if you’re not careful, you retain so much water that if the rain suddenly falls from the sky, flooding threatens. Wassink: „If you close all watercourses, you have solved the drought. But then this area has become one big swamp. You don’t want that either.”

And another thing: you cannot combat the drought in a short period of time, as you might be able to do with flooding by, for example, building a dike or a dam. Tackling the drought will take decades, in which different measures have to be taken in different places.

Wassink: “I think in the first six years of our program we are at about 10 percent of the total.” Water managers do not expect to be more or less ready until 2050. But even then, no matter how much you can limit the effects of drought, you cannot prevent it from raining. So if no more drops fall, you are powerless as a water manager. Wassink looks around at the banks of the Regge and says: “If it doesn’t rain for a month or more, it will be brown here.”