Snowballs were thrown, the police horses galloped through the pasture, cops ran through the streets with rifles drawn. The Maagdenhuis occupation of 1969 may be emblematic of the new era, but how six years earlier the Reformed farmers in a village in Drenthe had defied authority was at least as much.
But at the end of the day, Hartman’s farm had been emptied.
Hans Koekoek, eleven years old, was not there. He had to go to school. His uncle Hendrik Koekoek was there, they called him the leader of the small farmers, yes, even of the revolt. He became so famous in the countryside with it that two months later he was elected to the House of Representatives with his Peasant Party. He was there for eighteen years, longer than most. But when he died in 1987, the House refused to commemorate him.
The story of the second half of the twentieth century is one of economies of scale, of more, more, more, of increasingly intensive agriculture. Until in the 21st century it turned out that there were limits to what the earth can handle. That such agriculture can wither nature, that it can destroy biosystems. That the government will drive contraction instead of growth.
In How God disappeared from Jorwerd Geert Mak described the rapid rise of the milking machine. In 1950 there were less than four thousand in the whole of the Netherlands. At least forty thousand in 1960. “Within three decades, the work to be devoted to an average dairy cow fell by more than eighty percent.”
Those were the years of population growth and the great leap forward in prosperity. People became consumers, wanted a car, a TV. The mouths had to be fed. Cheap, the government thought. The baker and the greengrocer were exchanged for the almost endless supply of the supermarket.
You could go both ways as a farmer. You could go along with it, with the efficiency efforts and rationalizations and enlargements that the government demanded and heavily subsidized. In a few years, your company could grow rapidly, with more and more cows or pigs, ever higher turnover – and ever narrower margins. The bank was more than happy to help you with it.
You couldn’t do it either. When they told Hans Koekoek at agricultural school that you should keep at least 120 pigs, he already thought: not in my life. He never had more than a hundred. By virtually not growing in good times, but by saving it was still possible.
Around him he saw the farmers who did intensify, who did grow every year. But almost all of them have since stopped.
Intensive farming
In the early 1960s, Drenthe still had about 16,000 cattle farmers. At the beginning of this century there were 2,515. In 2021: 1,315. In the municipality of Hoogeveen, which includes Hollandscheveld, the total number of farms has halved since the turn of the century: from 335 to 164. The number of cattle farms shrank even more: from 211 to 89. But the number of cattle remained virtually the same.
For the citizen this is the success of scaling up: he paid less money for his slavink and kilo of minced meat. For the climate, this was the tragedy: intensive agriculture emits a lot of greenhouse gases. And the farmer produced more with smaller margins. A third of farmers earn less than the minimum wage.
At his home, farmer Hans Mol shields one side of his face with both hands and whispers: “They allowed themselves to be seduced. They have allowed themselves to be misled.”
Because of the politicians, who loved it all, such highly efficient agriculture with their cheap meat, potatoes and vegetables. The agricultural sector received billions of euros in subsidies and tax benefits. The best farmers in the world, administrators boasted. By the bank, which of course liked that at least half of the farm belonged to them.
Mol himself never went along with it. They should know for themselves. But he wouldn’t want it. On Sundays: an hour of milking in the morning, an hour of milking in the afternoon. He has a Sunday, he is alive. With his boys, the children, his wife. A nice woman, he thinks, and he must have time for that. The big farmers always have something. Always the cattle, always the staff, hassle, laziness. No never. Hans Mol loves it. He can do it all by himself.
The bookkeeper said to me when I took over the company: you can’t last five years. And certainly not ten. I am 26 years later
Hans Mol dairy farmer
You’ve thought about quitting, says his wife. But they could never answer the question of what he should do next.
“The bookkeeper said to me when I took over the company: you can’t last five years. And certainly not ten. I am 26 years later. I tell you: either you are a farmer or you are not. In the bad years many farmers said: I can’t make it anymore. I never noticed. I’ve thought about stopping, but I couldn’t get it over my head. You go to the cattle and you think: beautiful, beautiful.”
Mol is what other farmers call a ‘hobby farmer’. He milks his 25 cows every morning and evening. He buys phosphate rights for them. He keeps the manure bookkeeping. When people ask what he is, he gives the same answer his father and grandfather gave: farmer.
But he, his wife and their nine children cannot eat it. So he works next door for a boss, he takes soil samples. That puts the food on the table. Hence: hobby farmer.
In essence, little has changed in his yard for decades. He milks the cows himself, just like his father, in the group barn. The cows are tied up side by side. From the point of view of animal welfare, since the cow cannot move freely, those stables are no longer built.
While so much has changed. Farmer Koekoek has seen it all happen. “My father worked harder than me. But when he was in the house, he was ready. Now you are dealing with the administration, the registrations, the manure accounting. The computer. Yes, it’s all easy. But how long are you behind it?”
In the cowshed, Jans Guichelaar takes his iPhone out of his pocket. PIN code, swipe right once, at the top right of the screen: the ‘Time-for-Cows’ app. He clicks on the top name, Marijke-14, and the app shows all the information Guichelaar might want to know about cow Marijke-14 on a Wednesday morning around half past eleven.
How many liters she gave this morning (slightly less than average) and at what time (around seven o’clock in the morning). How many weeks pregnant she is and when she has to go to what Guichelaar calls the maternity ward. How much food the robot has figured out that Marijke-14 can get when she puts her head in the feeder. Somewhere in the barn or in the meadow, the cows can choose for themselves, she walks around. The collar around her neck contains all the information the computer and Guichelaar need to know. Milking and feeding is done with a robot, all day long.
millionaires
But don’t think that farming is easy. At the kitchen table, with a view of a computer screen showing four camera images from the stable and the yard, Guichelaar and neighbor Johan Bakker explain.
“They say we have the best agriculture in the world. Our knowledge and expertise! That is true. But when I see what the two of us need to know about regulations, that’s huge. And then they try to call you crazy. That is not possible,” says Guichelaar.
“They say we are all millionaires. That’s real office talk. You may be a millionaire, but you don’t have a cent in the bank. It goes from generation to generation, the money is never on the table,” says Bakker.
And then again: if you were to sell everything, you might be a millionaire, but no longer a farmer.
They are the only two farmers in Hollandscheveld who work full-time on the farm. Guichelaar only since January 1, when he took over the company from his parents. He also has a zero-hours contract with the large agricultural company Agrifirm. Bakker has also worked alongside it for a long time.
Their cows are outside. They produce sustainable milk and the companies work climate neutrally, as their customer Albert Heijn demands. That means: 18,000 liters of milk per hectare of land per year. Then the grass absorbs as much as you emit, they say.
The older farmers in the village say: the younger farmers don’t know any better than to work with all kinds of rules, so they can still make it. These younger farmers say: there is always something new, is that necessary?
Guichelaar: “Then it was the acid rain, then it was the ozone layer and then the methane emissions and then suddenly the CO2. After the CO2 came the phosphate. I suddenly had to buy phosphate rights. Well, we all did. Now it’s nitrogen. Where does it end?”
If you sold everything, you might be a millionaire, but you wouldn’t be a farmer anymore
Bakker: “It always goes on. While there is no nitrogen problem at all. Yes, maybe with some farmers who are right next to a Natura 2000 area. But nationally there is no problem.”
Guichelaar: “The government has gotten itself into trouble with the critical deposition values for emissions. That’s the problem. They have to throw them off, then the problem is solved. They say the water quality is bad. But take a look at the lock on the right. You can see the bottom.”
There is a completely different problem, says Bakker. The Netherlands is not in balance. There should be a plan to import less, for example less rice. Eat some more potatoes. And only seasonal vegetables, including rejected vegetables. The entire narrative that arose after the war that people have to go on holiday and the prices of food can always be lowered, that has to change. But how do you convince the city dweller of this?
The government doesn’t care about nitrogen at all, they think, it’s about their land. That’s the whole point: that farmers own half of all land in the Netherlands, while about 0.5 percent of the people are still farmers.
Look at the piece of land here between the farms, Guichelaar points out. There will be a new dairy factory. Now there is a piece of forest and corn grows, isn’t that nature? He doesn’t want to say too much about it. It’s really good for the industry, of course. But the government also says it wants fewer farmers. So what are they doing?
The development from a farming village to a village with citizens has long since become unstoppable, thinks Bertus ten Caat, citizen, not a farmer, never wanted either. He is an upholsterer and wrote a book about the Boer Revolt. You could call him one of the village historians, not least because he was there himself in 1963 as a lad. Next to a memorial stone of that uprising at the entrance of the village, he says: “The situation is changing so much, you can’t do anything about it.”
When plans were drawn up for an industrial estate near Hollandscheveld twenty years ago, also on farmers’ land, he warned in the newspaper that it would get out of hand. Build a factory forty meters high and the next person will say: then I can also set up a shed twelve meters high in a meadow without any problems.
“You start to think, there is a huge area and there are a few cows, there is some corn and three people work there. Hundreds of people now work in that industrial area. This development is unstoppable. It’s going exactly as we predicted it back then. There will soon be a solar park. Once that is there, the fence is off the dam. Then it is already half an industrial area. Are nature or pastureland still relevant?”
It’s all about nature, that is the latest government plans. The nitrogen emitted by industry and farmers impoverishes nature. Plant species and animal populations are disappearing.
To restore nature to a legally acceptable level, nitrogen emissions must be halved by 2030. To achieve this, the government wants to buy out farmers, who are responsible for 60 percent of nitrogen emissions, and if necessary even expropriate them. According to the criticized card that the cabinet presented in June, 47 percent less nitrogen should be emitted around Hollandscheveld.
Bakker and Guichelaar say: sit down with the very large emitters next to a nature reserve, raise the standards, and you’re there.