2024-10-18 18:10:00
Arable farmer Joost van den Oetelaar was born more than 30 years ago in the center of Oirschot. Almost right under the monumental church on the market of the Brabant village. His parents still have a photo shop there. “But as a child I mainly drew tractors,” he says. His grandfather, he was a farmer. “I wanted that too; So after HAVO I went to HAS in Den Bosch.”
At the Higher Agricultural School, fellow students tried to temper his expectations. Want to become a farmer without a business in the family? That’s a difficult story. “You can become a consultant, they said. But not a farmer after all?” Just think: no land, no machines, no stables or sheds. Where should a young man in his twenties get the starting capital if he wants to start a farm from scratch?
Yet Van den Oetelaar simply started. When he was nineteen years old doing an internship at an organic company in Mierlo, he saw an advertisement for Ekoplaza. The organic supermarket was looking for a farmer who could grow snow peas. He was able to lease a piece of land from the owner of his internship company. One thing led to another. “I started working and saving. In August 2015 I worked 381 hours. And I scoured the internet for second-hand tractors and machines. So suddenly I had a tractor before I had a shed to put it in.”
Organic
That dream was now also linked to a conviction: Van den Oetelaar wanted to farm organically. “Why would you inject poison if you don’t have to?” he asks. Preventive, to prevent damage to crops, he learned at school. “There we were taught about spraying schedules. After two weeks, apply a herbicide against weeds. And a few weeks later a remedy against the Colorado potato beetle. But then you start spraying against a beetle that is not there and may not come. I prefer to work without it.”
He also prefers to ignore organic alternatives. “In the first few years I did not dare to deviate from the advice on crop protection. But we haven’t sprayed anything for the last three years. And that’s actually better than when I did that.”
Choosing organic made his farming dream even more difficult. Land is in any case a major stumbling block for a farmer who starts from scratch. In the densely populated and intensively built-up Netherlands, hectares are expensive. In Oirschot, prices for a piece of land measuring 100 by 100 meters are now above 100,000 euros. Leasing can be a solution, but that is extra difficult for an organic farmer.
Transition period
Soil is not organic by magic: there is a transition period of two years. This obligation is intended to ensure that the remains of fertilizer and pesticides disappear from the soil. During that conversion phase, a farmer must work fully in accordance with the regulations, but he is not yet allowed to sell his products as organic.
That period is in any case difficult for a prospective organic farmer, but even more so with Van den Oetelaar’s land issue. “Many lease contracts are only for a short period, while I needed two years anyway for the land to yield something after conversion,” he reflects. He took risks by investing in land without the absolute certainty that he could use it for years. “But the alternative was no land. I had no other choice: I dared to be afraid.”
Van den Oetelaar and his girlfriend Mandy van den Boer recently have that coveted security. They have just moved to a long-fronted farm on the main road to Moergestel. “I always kept a close eye on vacant land, and I knew the farmer was going to stop here.” The dairy farmer who worked there until recently turned out to lease the land from the De Rosep estate. A golden opportunity to take a big step after years of gathering land left and right. To a real, private farm, with a house plot.
Investment fund
But he could not make that investment alone. He eventually turned to the Sustainable Agriculture Investment Fund (IDL) of the National Green Fund. A pot of money intended for farmers who want to invest heavily in sustainability, but have plans that are too risky for a regular bank. The Green Fund fills that gap through a loan that is interest-only for the first few years. The condition is that the bank ultimately also pays, and a company comes up with an integrated plan to enter the future in a sustainable way.
The IDL started in 2021 as a pilot project, which the National Green Fund is implementing on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture. Van den Oetelaar receives exactly the hundredth loan. Many more could follow, emphasizes head of financing Dick Boddeüs. The government made more than 130 million available this summer, in addition to the 31 million that was already in the fund. “That’s more money than it seems,” he emphasizes. “Because for every euro we invest, we also raise four euros from the market, because banks also contribute.”
Moreover, the money flows back in the long term. “Our total investment volume exceeds one billion. We can certainly help a thousand farmers with this,” adds fund manager Rob van Eijck. “We are certainly no longer just there for the pioneers: we can also help the peloton to take sustainable steps.”
To date, the majority of granted applications have come from dairy farmers; they too are often looking for more land to expand their business. After all, fewer cows per hectare means that it becomes easier to apply all the manure on your own land, and thus allow the grass to grow again that serves as feed for the herd.
‘Tax amnesty’
Yet the National Green Fund also faces the land scarcity on a larger scale that a farmer like Van den Oetelaar has to contend with. “Land prices in the Netherlands are extremely high,” Van Eijck emphasizes. “Many farmers will stop using the buyout schemes that the government currently has open in the near future. But land remains outside the agreement. We notice that many farmers who quit keep their land.”
That in itself is quite an attractive investment: the land is still steadily increasing in value. “Moreover, it is fiscally unfavorable to stop being a farmer,” notes Van Eijck. The land will then have to be transferred from the company to private property. However, a higher tax rate applies.
Although that system will change, that will not help much, according to Van Eijck. According to the new rules, a significant assessment will follow if the land increases in value. All in all, it is attractive for a retiring farmer to continue his business on paper, to let the land yield a return and, if necessary, to grow or have something remodeled on it every year as necessary.
“That also means that all that agricultural land is tied up,” Van Eijck emphasizes. “And it has difficulty becoming available; certainly not for young entrepreneurs who are looking for security for several years. There should actually be some kind of tax amnesty for farmers who quit: it should become attractive to make land available to young farmers who want to use it in a sustainable way.”
Farm shop
Joost van den Oetelaar and Mandy van den Boer certainly have that long-term security on their new house plot. “We lease about 15 hectares of land for a period of 40 years,” says Van den Oetelaar. Switching the soil to organic is possible here without the risk of losing it quickly.
They have now moved to the farm. The machines will soon be located in the old stable for the dairy cattle. There will be a new warehouse with storage for vegetables and apartments for migrant workers who come to work at the company. And a long-awaited farm shop should be built in the left wing of the long-facade farm.
After ten years of farming, Van den Oetelaar has what he wanted as a child: his own farm. Perhaps even more ‘personal’ than that of all his classmates at HAS. “I often said to my father: ‘If only we had a farm’,” he reflects. “But there is also the advantage of starting ourselves: we have the freedom to do it exactly the way we want.”
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