Hire A Farmer To Grow Your Food

Herenboeren is taking the Netherlands by storm, with city dwellers and urbanites paying farmers to produce food according to their exact specifications. Gerhard Uys spoke to Boudewijn Tooren, a board member of the co-operative, about this radical approach to farming.

- Boudewijn Tooren

On a 100ha piece of land in Boxtel, the Netherlands, 165 ordinary families are renting land and paying a farmer to raise free range pigs, cattle and chickens, and to grow 55 different types of vegetables to their organic specifications. The co-operative, called Herenboeren, was initiated by Boudewijn Tooren and a group of friends in 2015. While the families rent 100ha of land from a foundation, production is only on 20ha.

Despite the apparently small area of production, the operation provides a box with five types of vegetables and some meat to each family per week.

STARTING OUT

According to Tooren, a board member of Herenboeren, he and his friends had been thinking about the concept since 2012.

“We were four or five people that discussed how we can have more control over how our food is produced. After years of discussing the concept we decided to stop debating and just start,” Tooren says.

Tooren and his friends placed advertisements in newspapers and on various other platforms to attract families to invest in the farm, and in 2015, 50 families joined the venture.

“The first 50 families are true heroes as they believed in what we wanted to do. The families that followed could visit the farm and see what was happening before they invested. We now have 165 families, and have space for about 210,” he says.

Initially, each family invested €2 000 (about R30 974). However, the €100 000 (R1,5 million) from this was not enough, and it was calculated that they needed €250 000 (R3,87 million) to get production going. They loaned the remainder from the Markgraaff Foundation, from whom they also rent the land, and from a bank.