From resting against a cow while milking it from a milking stool to modern robotic barns where farmers barely come into contact with their own cows: in her book ’Hoe de natuur uit de landbouw verdween’ (How nature vanished from farming), Radboud historian Marij Leenders illustrates how farming has significantly changed since the nineteenth century. "Farmers have an instinctive connection with nature, and rediscovering this link is crucial."
In this book, the farmers go into great detail. All of their experiences are very different. "If this book shows anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as a classic farmer," says researcher Marij Leenders. "On the one hand, you’ve got organic farmers and on the other, you’ve got fully mechanised large-scale farms. But most farmers can be found somewhere in between. Their interaction with their farmland and animals is much more complicated. Due to technological changes, nature has vanished from farming, but it still plays a part in the farmers’ lives."
The farmer’s perspective
In addition to being a historian, Leenders is also a nature lover and a farm girl. "Both nature and farming are close to my heart. And these two things shouldn’t contradict each other, either. Rediscovering the instinctive connection that farmers have with nature is crucial." A great deal of historical research has been carried out on farming, but little research has been done out from the farmers’ perspective. The researcher has used both letters that had been submitted by farmers and existing interviews. She also interviewed farmers herself, including those from her own family. "Each one of them has a connection with nature, either with the land or with their own animals. Even farmers with mega farms form a bond with individual animals, for example, when these animals are sick."
Although the historian claims that the farmers’ connection with nature has never disappeared, she believes that it has been hampered by a variety of outside forces. These range from the introduction of fertilisers in the late 19th century to land consolidation and the advent of ploughing and milking machines. "The farmers found themselves in a kind of rat race of intensification and modernisation," the researcher says. "For example, in order to get a mortgage from the farmers’ lending bank - which later became the Rabobank - you needed to become larger as a farm."
Frequent addition of new rules
Over the years, farmers had to deal with many different policies as old rules gradually proved to be ineffective. The slogan that was subsequently adopted after the Second World War was ’never go hungry again’. This meant that farmers needed to start producing large quantities. Even though the required production levels had been reached by the 1950s, production continued to grow well into the 1970s. This was followed by the dairy surplus of the ’milk lake’ and the ’butter mountain’: these were huge excesses, which were dumped in African countries, for example, which disrupted the market. This consequently led to the introduction of milk quotas.
Leenders uses the example of a farmer from Boxtel, who lives by the Beerze River. When this farmer was a young boy in the 1960s, he saw how land consolidation led to the straightening of the river. As a result of this, his father was able to build a large farm. But in the 1990s, the water posed problems: it could not drain away and the villages were vulnerable to flooding, so the river needed to meander once again. The farmer took matters into his own hands by persuading the other farmers to ’return some of their land to nature’. He saw a change in ideas about what nature is and about farming practices. The farmers had to adapt to the new reality.
Leenders believes that we can learn from this story. "If there is no reflection, modernisation will just forge ahead and we’ll look back and think: Should we have done that? This is something that we still see today. In 1972, the Club of Rome already claimed that we needed to make cut backs. We are depleting the earth. If you’re familiar with this history, you can see that we’re repeating ourselves, which is why it’s important to keep reflecting on what we’re doing. This book shows that many farmers themselves are still quite capable of doing just this."
’Hoe de natuur uit de landbouw verdween’ [How nature vanished from farming] will be published on 19 September 2024 by the WBOOKS publishing company.
