On Friday, 6 December, we organised a grower meeting on regenerative practices in agriculture. Three of our farmers, John Huiberts (Huiberts biologische bloembollen), Peter Harry Mulder en Gert Noordhoff shared their experiences with different measures, such as the use of compost tea, but also no-tillage, plant juice analysis and even the use of seaweed. All three aim for healthy soil on which to grow resilient crops, but it soon became clear from the stories that they often have to deal with trade-offs in doing so.
John Huiberts – Sint Maartensbrug (North-Holland)
John and Johanna Huiberts have an organic bulb farm in Sint Maartensvlotbrug in the tip of North Holland. On their farm, they have strip cropping with fixed driving lanes. John has now been working organically for 12 years and talks about his experiences, specifically with regenerative measures such as compost tea, bokashi and nettle tea.
It started with stem eel. A big problem in bulb growing and something you didn't want to be known for. John took a course on soil that opened his eyes. He switched to organic, with as little tillage as possible, no ploughing and he started using compost tea. He has now been at it for 12 years and he says it works very well. The combination of ferments provides a good variety of nutrients. Asked why he wants variety, he said, ‘I hate eating the same thing every day myself as well.’ John says he doesn't so much need to know how it works as that it works. He also uses green manure mixtures. He thought: if livestock farmers have to feed herb-rich grass to their cows, why not us?
Financially, converting his farm was challenging though. He started with 40 ha of organic cultivation. That meant different varieties too. First he had 25 ha of daffodils. Now he has more diversity of bulbs. He also markets organic bulbs through Intratuin and Hornbach, but he doesn't see the market share growing. Where it does grow: sales through webshops and to municipalities. He does try to educate municipalities a bit. He would like them to order a year in advance, so he can better estimate what stocks he needs to keep.
John has also adapted many other processes on his farm. Actually, he did not want potted bulbs, but now he does, because there is a demand for them. He didn't want staff in the yard, which also failed. He did not want dahlias, but there is a lot of demand for them, so he now grows them. So the innovative farmer has to be flexible.
In terms of sales, John thinks his industry needs to get closer to consumers. What is in demand? Udea, Ekoplaza's supplier, knows its customers and suppliers. The director takes the time for you. This is important, because cooperation is needed for continuity of the organic offer. ‘Because if I stop, organic shops might go out of business,’ he says. Fortunately, there are candidates willing to take over John's business so that he can retire.
John's farm also includes mixed crops of field bean and peas. [Also watch this video about the mixed crop below] The beans give a nice structure to the soil and he can turn the crop into bokashi with 12% nitrogen. Some goes away for cow feed and John sprays the juice as leaf feed. ‘We grind and ferment them. Because of the acidity, they can be stored for a long time.’
John also stopped ploughing when switching. ‘No more ploughing with bulbs is swearing in church,’ John says, but he still does it for the sake of soil health. ‘The only thing is that the soil is no longer as nice and flat when there are leftover green manure crops. On the other hand, if you have no life in your soil, nothing happens when you spread compost.’ Another common practice in bulb growing is to cover the soil with straw. John no longer does that either. He says: ‘That straw all comes from France, England and so on. I think that's a waste of transport. That's why we no longer cover with straw.’
John got the idea of spraying nettle tea over his bulbs from kitchen gardeners. ‘I search the internet about vegetable gardeners and they make nettle tea. ‘Why don't we do that,’ I thought. It's good for natural defences against aphids and aphids in particular pass on viruses.’ The nettles are strongest in bloom at the end of May, but actually John wants to spray as early as April, so he makes tea from them that he can store. ‘We harvested the nettles in May and the tea is ready for April. We use about 10L per hectare. The stalks go back into the compost.’
John also uses seaweed from which he makes juice. ‘This contains root-promoting hormones. We spray the juice with nettle and rock meal in spring and in autumn with the planter.’ All ideas that John has had to invent himself. As a pioneer, that is quite difficult, he tells us, ‘because you only have one chance a year.’ Yet his efforts seem to be working. On his farm, the soil organic matter has risen from 1.2 to 2. John is therefore very satisfied with his (new) farm management.
Peter Harry Mulder – Bellingwolde (Groningen)
Second to speak was Peter Harry Mulder, mainstream arable farmer from Muntendam, Groningen. He has strip cropping of 27m wide, mainly to boost biodiversity, especially birds. His strip width is matched to his spray width. His fertiliser spreader is also 27m wide, but he is spreading less and less fertiliser and looking for plant-based alternatives.
‘Besides strip cropping, I have agricultural nature management strips,’ Peter Harry explains. ‘I mow it and dispose of the clippings. After four years I can already see a difference.’ Peter Harry believes that strip cropping strengthens crop interactions, but especially in narrow strips. ‘With narrower strips I have no experience myself, but even with 27m you bring back a certain small scale. I have more nature and also have partridges.’ His goal is a resilient farming system in which birds also benefit. Since most of the acreage in the Netherlands is conventional, he would like to work to ensure that conventional is developed into nature-inclusive.
Peter Harry is a grower who keeps careful records of the measures he takes and their effects. He shows us several excel tables in which he has accurately tracked how much time and resources he has spent. He also has a list of measures he has introduced on his farm over the years. Since 2009, he has been doing agricultural nature management on all plots. He has replaced slurry with solid manure and only fertilises in autumn. He also stopped using insecticides. That seemed the easiest thing for him to eliminate and is better for the insect-eating birds he loves. Peter Harry: ‘You target aphids, but other insects also go down, and you remove feed for birds. I don't have time to test everything, but once I feel confident that something worked, I apply it to the whole farm immediately.’
One such measure is to stop ploughing, a well-known regenerative measure to disrupt soil life less. ‘I only use a cultivator,’ he says, ’12 to 15 cm deep, because otherwise machines get stuck.’ Peter Harry has also been running a farm comparison study on environmental impact since 2016. He shows a graph in which the environmental burden among participants is decreasing. ‘The general downward trend is because resources are becoming more environmentally friendly, not because less is necessarily being sprayed,’ he explains. ‘But I do perform better compared to colleagues.’
The move to also introduce compost tea was spurred by other resources becoming too expensive. ‘I could afford to spend a bit more on trying new things. I spent an extra 17,700 euros on measures to become more sustainable. With compost tea, I tried to reduce that amount. I have already gone from 177 to 70 euros per ha of costs. In doing so, I have spread incidental measures over four years. My savings on resources is about 100 euros per ha.’
Before Peter Harry started compost tea, he had extensive analysis done on the plant sap in beet, potato and barley. That way, he knew which nutrients his crops were still lacking. He then started brewing tea using two large compost kegs. ‘I bought two kettles so that I have enough for potatoes, about 100 to 150 litres per hectare,’ he explains. Last year, he did 11 compost rounds with the two tanks. Between 17 June and 25 September, he also sprayed the tea on the green manure crop. He sprayed the potatoes most often.
It is obvious to take even more measures, but Peter Harry must also remain realistic. ‘You actually want to do more, but for the moment this is enough for me,’ he says of his experiments. ‘Young farmers should continue the development. I do do it on all 70 hectares, but it is risky and costly at the beginning.’
What was particularly striking in Peter Harry's experiment with the compost tea was the trade-off of savings with extra work. Moreover, much of the work had to be done at night because it is best not to spray when it is very hot or when there is a lot of wind. It took Peter Harry a lot of evening hours to spray the compost tea. ‘You can realise a decrease in your chemical control, but I was spending 55 more hours spraying,’ he says. So for a positive result, as a farmer in the shorter term, you have to put in some effort.
Gert Noordhoff – Bellingwolde (Groningen)
The third speaker was Gert Noordhoff, an organic farmer from Bellingwolde in Groningen. Together with his father, he has been working on agricultural nature management since the late 1990s. What struck him is that this works better if you cluster and coordinate it with your neighbours. In recent decades, he saw arable farming disappearing from the region and cattle replacing it. Where one farmer did agricultural nature management and the neighbour did not, you unintentionally created an ecological trap. Gert was ambitious and wanted to do things for nature. Around 2016, he came across strip cropping through the Bio Fair.
The heavy clay makes the area, the Dollart polder in Groningen, traditionally a cereal area. Crops such as Eenkorn, sometimes called bucket wheat, and spelt were common. Although strip cropping works fine with cereals, Gert himself has the most affinity with vegetables. ‘With vegetables, it's even more important how wide the strips are, because vegetables are quite vulnerable to pests and diseases,’ he says.
Gert tried strip cropping and saw immediate effects. ‘Strips of 1m with pointed cabbage and red cabbage worked very well in terms of suppressing diseases, but were difficult to harvest. We still work with a tractor and a crate on the front. Next year we will get a conveyor belt, so that should help.’
Gert also delves into the flavour of the vegetables he grows. ‘In wine growing, they are working on terroir, how the specific location and soil where grapes come from affects the flavour. I wondered: with vegetables, why do we only look above ground and not what's below? How deep is that clay actually and what effect does that have on the crops?’ This was also at the heart of the Grain Republic, a cooperative that Gert founded with other farmers to collectively produce grain for beer, gin and cooking grains. ‘Unfortunately, the cooperative is dismantled ,’ says Gert. But he continues his research into flavour.
Back to strip cropping. Flavour is something Gert wants to use to distinguish his vegetables. In this, varieties also make a difference, he noted. What Gert is looking for: how to make good crop combinations? He says: ‘Regenerative agriculture focuses on soil, but I don't hear much about crop combinations. How does that work below ground? Plants are not loners. They are not individualists. A plant lives by the grace of its environment, such as fungi and bacteria in the soil.’
According to Gert, farmers' focus should therefore be underground. But even his own organic colleagues often only look at above-ground processes. ‘You have to learn to look at your soil and anticipate the signals you see, such as certain weeds that tell you how your soil is doing,’ Gert says. He also enjoys getting back into crop care with a focus on soil. ‘Improving crops was something I missed in organic farming, where I was mostly fighting weeds.’
On his farm, Gert applies several regenerative measures that improve the soil. One is keeping the soil covered at all times. ‘In bare soil, after just two weeks it is no longer alive. So it is important to have living roots in the soil, which does present a challenge on heavy clay,’ Gert says. In addition, like John and Peter Harry, Gert also applies compost tea. He says: ‘In tap water there is always a little bit of chlorine. We therefore get surface water from a lake. We filter it and add it to our compost tea vessels.’ Like Peter Harry, Gert also agrees that administering compost tea is a lot of work. ‘My family noticed it too,’ he says. Nevertheless, he continues with it because he hopes that the better natural balance in the soil will eventually mean less hoeing.
Another measure is the introduction of a 3-metre-wide permanent grass strip in the middle of his plots with two 12-metre crops next to it. Due to the heavy clay, the land is sometimes impassable with machinery when wet. ‘This measure costs a lot of yield perhaps, but even in heavy rain, I want to be able to get on the land,’ he says. Gert has also already experimented with sheep on these grass strips. According to Dietmar Näser, a German agronomist from whom Gert recently took a course on regenerative agriculture, he should put trees or bushes on pieces of land he has ‘left over’ - something that used to be very common. ‘But is not so good for field birds again,’ Gert says, ’And it makes your plots less flexible.’
A final measure that Gert highlights is an experiment with vegetable manure made from seaweed instead of animal manure, mainly because manure is increasingly difficult to obtain and expensive. Gert wants an alternative. The seaweed they took off the dyke. This does make the compost tea thicker, so less easy to spray, and varieties differ in how they react. According to Gert, the process is also slower. So it remains a matter of weighing trade offs.
To learn about regenerative agriculture, Gert turned to German agronomist Dietmar Näser, among others, who made use of a necessity when he had no access to fertilisers and chemicals in eastern Germany in the 1980s. Gert took a course from him and saw that there is more knowledge about regenerative practices outside the Netherlands. According to Gert, this may be because in the Netherlands, we always had access to fertilisers and plant protection products. 'As a result, we felt no need to delve into alternatives here.’
In any case, our meeting made it clear that there now is a need for knowledge on alternatives to chemical inputs and knowledge on regenerative measures. Fortunately, there are pioneering farmers who are exploring on their own and are willing to experiment and share their lessons, like Gert, Peter Harry and John.
Thank you John, Peter Harry, and Gert for sharing your inspiring stories and experiences!
