Producing Milk in Harmony with Nature

Our goal as dairy farmers in the Netherlands is to produce the world’s best milk in harmony with nature.

We pay a lot of attention to the welfare of the cows and the people who work on our farm. Both, they have to feel comfortable and okay.

We produce a delicious drink that is part of a healthy diet—and we strive to supply it in a sustainable way.

That means being super-efficient and keeping our carbon footprint as small as possible.

This surprises a lot of people. Many of them mistakenly think that farmers don’t care about the climate or the environment.

Yet on our farm, we’re reminded of our surroundings every day.

We’re close to the Wadden Sea, in the northernmost part of the Netherlands. This proximity affects everything we do—and it has given us a remarkable opportunity to produce our own energy on our farm for our herd of about 350 animals on 100 hectares.

The energy that our farm requires comes entirely from the wind and the sun.

Our reliance on these renewable resources is one of the ways we work in harmony with nature.

But that’s not all. We’re blessed with a rich and loamy soil, which we’ve improved with drainage tiles that allow us to keep the water table low in a technique that reduces soil erosion, boosts biodiversity, and allows us to use innovative feeding strategies.

We grow a wide range of crops, such as grass, clover, fodder beets, and corn. We also exchange goods and services with neighboring farmers. As we trade crops, manure, and labor in an intensive system for mutual advantage, we produce our milk with low levels of protein in the feed ration, which in turn reduces the amount of methane that our cows emit.

That’s good for the climate.

Another aspect of our sustainability is efficiency. Since 1998, we’ve milked our dairy cows with robots, which may sound like science fiction but for us is now an ordinary way of doing business. We also keep our cows in comfort stalls, which is good for their health and production. It lets us work with older animals and enjoy low rates of culling.

So we’re doing more with less.

We seek to tell our story because it seems these days that everybody has an opinion about agriculture. This can be especially true among the people who know the least about it.

Yet they’re also ready to learn.

We discovered this shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago. Suddenly, nobody in the Netherlands could find sunflower oil in their shops.

Many consumers had come to believe that they could buy anything at any time. They took farmers for granted.

It wasn’t entirely their fault. Lots of people today grow up without farmers in their families or among their friends. They don’t know how much work and innovation goes into food production.

When the war disrupted everything, people realized that there’s nothing automatic about the availability and abundance of what we eat.

They started listening more to farmers. We saw one result in last year’s Dutch provincial elections, when voters handed victories to a farmer-friendly political party.

That’s what can happen when farmers tell their stories.

We do this all the time, of course. I recently returned from a visit to New Zealand, a major dairy producer that is about as far away from the Netherlands as you can get—it’s almost exactly on the opposite side of the planet.

When I go abroad, I spend most of my time meeting and collaborating with other farmers, engaging in the knowledge transfer that helps us understand our common challenges and share potential solutions.

Yet we must also take the time to talk to the public.

Our world is going to need 50 percent more food by 2050, due to population growth as well as a rising middle class with better incomes.

Success will require trade, technology, and more. Most of all, however, it will require farmers to describe their practices and communicate their ideas about production and sustainability.

If you want food, you need farmers.

And if you want milk made in harmony with nature, you need farmers like me.