- Speaker #0
Hi, welcome back to the Deep Seed podcast and happy holidays to anyone listening. I really appreciate you spending your time listening to these conversations and feeding your brain and your soul with all of that wisdom and that knowledge that I went and captured. from some truly amazing people over the last year. Today I'm revisiting my conversation with Anna van Leeuwen. She's a regenerative farmer from the Netherlands who had to move to a new farm this year and she explains the process of accessing that land, writing a business plan, planning a whole farming system from scratch and so much more. She's such a beautiful and inspiring human being with an incredibly warm and positive energy. I feel blessed to have met her and to have had the opportunity to visit her new farm and to speak with her for a couple of hours for the podcast. As usual, I strongly recommend going back and listening to the full original conversation. But if you're short on time, here's a shorter 25 minute version. This episode was made in partnership with Soil Capital. I am your host, Raphael, and this is the Deep Seed Podcast.
- Speaker #1
This farm that was bought, we're now in Lochem, in the east of the Netherlands, in the Achterhoek, in a different place. This farm was bought by Lenteland, an organization, a foundation. that buys farms and that realizes actually regenerative community farms. But we never intended to apply to this farm because we thought we already had our farm. But something went unexpectedly in that process and there was again an opening for applying to this farm but only like I think a week later from when we officially heard there was no future for us anymore at the other farm. And then I thought, God, perhaps they're like, you know, very much of a roller coaster feeling, but perhaps they're like two stars in the sky that actually should align and we should apply for this farm. So we applied and then we got through this very serious selective process of writing a business plan that was way more challenging than the business plan that we initially wrote for five hectares, because this is 45 hectares and a huge investment. So we needed to make it work because otherwise we should never start this. And I could have never done it like four or five years ago. I would have never done this project and I could also have never done it with the team that we have now, which is an amazing team. So I'm not at all farming here alone. No, we have a very great team of four farmers that are managing the place. So it's just me and my partner. And then we have Rose who is farming and hosting. Also I have a campsite here that she manages, but she's also sort of a host of the whole, we call it ERV, it's the whole place where also the community aspect happens of the farm. And we have Dan who is a really young talented farmer who was an apprentice at our previous farm and we already saw that this guy is really, you know, he has got... talent for farming but also an ecological sensitivity that you don't see a lot in people and totally in love with trees and we thought we actually really need him on our team because we have a very ambitious plan for agroforestry and a tree nursery in this place and he was sort of perfect for you know making this happen. So that's also why we shifted not only we changed farm
- Speaker #0
but we also changed team and organization and now we've landed here for yeah a little over two months yes it's very new very fresh it's very new it's very fresh yeah i could see it with my own eyes you just gave me a quick tour of the of the farm just before we started the conversation it looks super promising and you showed me the map the plan of it all and yeah i i guess it must have been very very hard to leave the farm behind yeah um but at the same time once you've I guess um you've accepted it uh and move you decided to move forward it's very exciting to start a new project like that with everything you've learned so far with a great team of people like that and just to be able to not make the same mistakes that you probably did in the past yeah I guess everyone does yeah yeah make some more yeah but you know for sure yeah it
- Speaker #1
must be very exciting and I'm excited for you yeah thanks yeah it is but it was like only peaks like sort of I'm also like okay In the next years we need to make some space for the middle grounds because it was like only super high super low and The thing that really helped me also was we organized a really beautiful goodbye ceremony also with our community of people who were eating from the farm, who were connected to the farm, who were learning at the farm, who were working at the farm, you know, to say goodbye to the place. And to do that together was beautiful. And then we had the grand opening here, I think a week after. And yeah, that really helped also to land again. And now I feel like I've looked like very short tap roots, but you know, I can start to.
- Speaker #0
Nice. But I can feel your optimism and your excitement. Yes,
- Speaker #1
it's an amazing place. And it's also really amazing to work with Lenteland, so this organization, because the beauty of the model of Lenteland is they buy a farm as a foundation and then they set up this local corporation that owns the buildings and the grounds. And then... That is refinanced with our business plan and by inviting people to become co-owner of the place. So that money comes back in and then we pay, we pay that to Lentiland Foundation. And with that money, they buy another farm. So it's sort of like a revolving farm fund in which... Everything that we invest in this place actually results in another amazing place. And that's the beauty of it.
- Speaker #0
That's incredible. That's actually what I was going to ask you about, because I know that access to land is a very, very key topic.
- Speaker #1
It's very difficult, sadly enough.
- Speaker #0
But something that keeps coming back on the conversations I've had on the podcast is that there's going to be a whole generation of farmers retiring quite soon. And a lot of them don't necessarily have someone taking over the farm yet. And so there's going to be a need for a lot of... farmers, young farmers, or not so young, it doesn't matter. And access to land seems to be the number one and the biggest issue the biggest hurdle to get over.
- Speaker #1
It's a huge issue. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
This model sounds very promising, very interesting.
- Speaker #1
It is, yeah. And the great thing is that people can really connect to the place and also co-own the place. So I love the beauty of in a way it sort of merges the regenerative with the commons thinking. Because it is also a bit crazy that we own land or who owns land and why? These are weird questions and you see it's so speculative. In the Netherlands, it's so extremely expensive to get access to a house, to get access to land as a farmer. It's crazy if you have to repay a debt for buying a place like this with carrots. I mean, it's just like, it's just crazy because we... we just we've been paying less and less of our income to food and the house price and the land price has just gone up and like it's totally out of balance there's no almost no sense in it anymore um so now you've you've acquired your piece of land and your farm
- Speaker #0
45 hectares of land which you've told me earlier is a big farm in the netherlands a big farm in the netherlands i still haven't really gotten my head around the
- Speaker #1
The size.
- Speaker #0
The size is when I hear a number of hectares, I'm struggling.
- Speaker #1
It's like 90 football fields.
- Speaker #0
So 45 hectares, which is a really nice scale for a farm in the Netherlands. So now you have all of that space. You need to create a plan, I guess, of what you're going to plant, where, what you're going to grow.
- Speaker #1
Then we start it off with, which is a really good thing. Yeah,
- Speaker #0
it's a part of the plan.
- Speaker #1
Plan, because otherwise it's not going to work.
- Speaker #0
But I'm curious about... how you make that plan how you make the decisions about what to grow yeah how much of what is it more based on your climate your the weather locally the soil yeah or is it more about the supply chains and the demand and like maybe you can tell me more about yeah it's it's in in that way always context specific like what do you grow where and why um so
- Speaker #1
the in a way it is sort of similar to what we were planning at our small scale farm in Malden, but then in a different context and on a different scale and a different team. So things change. And also this neighborhood is also very different. So you do take all of these things in account before you make a plan. The thing we knew that we are, yeah, we really love to grow as much perennial as we can. Because that makes so much sense, climate-wise, water-wise, resiliency-wise. But also here, this is a landscape full of trees. It's famous for its coulisse landscape. So it's like famous for these small fields surrounded by trees. And a lot of these trees have been cut. over the years in this region. So it makes a lot of sense in this specific local context to replant trees. And we also dove a little bit into the history of the place and we had a lot of really nice conversations with the previous farmers who were still here when we moved in. To really understand what was going on here and how this farm developed. So the farm is called Schagel. which is totally impossible in any other language i guess uh but it's it's it's a dutch name for plant medica gale and gale is a specific marsh plant like a plant that likes to grow in really peaty marshlands because this used to be a place with a lot of turf but they you know dug it all out and removed the turf and then they put other soil and then they sort of drained the place and then it became agriculture or agricultural landscape so one of the things that was very clear for us is like we should regenerate this farm in a way that there is place again for milica gale because that's at the root of this farm and there was actually a plant that was used in beer before we grew hop so that was an interesting thing So I hope we're going to have a Gagelbier in the future. That's for sure. So we knew there should be a sort of a marshland should be part of this ecosystem. And also water makes all of the difference because now it's landscape that drains. But if you have a way to really capture that water, let it sink in, filtrate, slow it down, make it part again of this landscape, then life will just burst out of it, of course. I also have a partner who is... crazy about amphibians so it should be a place where tree fox can thrive there was also something sort of clear uh to us and yeah you need a model which we also figured out in um in our journey towards our first farm you need a model which you can have income on a short term uh midterm waiting for long-term um income from trees and especially not trees because they might take nine or ten years so And the basic idea for that was, OK, if we start a no-dig garden, you know, you can grow vegetables immediately. Like now, we just put down a garden and you can grow vegetables. So it's immediate income. We have chickens in Agmobus that we, you know, drive around for holistic plant grazing. And you have eggs immediately. So you immediately have something you can sell, you can build up a market with. Small, but it can help. And here the garden is quite... going to be quite substantial because it's going to be 7 000 square meters of no-dig garden which is a big uh twice the size of what we were running in malden and then the the bigger landscape uh yeah just asks for huge investment of course in um in planting and in um in time but there you also have sort of layers so you have like a break-even point for berries. So this might be three, four years. Then you have fruit trees, which is perhaps six, seven years. And then you have your nuts that might only come around seriously from nine years. So you have this build-up plan in which you can, you know, financially bridge. And thankfully, we have a campsite which can help to, you know, create some extra revenues. We can also, because we are still a place where people come. to learn about regeneration and also what they can do themselves. We can also make that part of it. So we make this beautiful, sort of holistic plan where we can farm, you can connect to yourself in this place, to regeneration, and you can stay. You can stay to let us sink in, to be our guest or to eat with us, because the eating part was always something we were missing. and for the farming explicitly we developed also because we really wanted Dan to be part of our team so we developed four business lines so we have the the no-dig garden then we have an agroforestry system it's actually gonna be around 40 kilometers of berries fruit trees and nuts and there you yeah you basically look in landscape-wise, what makes sense design-wise in a place like this. So that is the historical landscape, the cultural landscape, but also just walking around in your biosphere, in your region, you can figure out what works and what doesn't work. So for example, the previous farm, we were really focusing on chestnuts because it made a lot of sense. We had this really sandy soil, very dry place. Chestnuts were doing amazing. Here, it's too wet. So we're not going to grow a lot of chestnuts. We're going to grow some because we love them, but it's not going to be prime tree business. So here we're going to focus on soft fruits. We're going to focus on cherries and on plums. And then in the end, we will plant over 2,000 or 200 varieties of trees. So it will be a lot of diversity in this place. But those will be like two main things we would love to sell also because... Everybody says that you cannot grow cherries without poison.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, and you want to prove otherwise?
- Speaker #1
I think it's ridiculous that that's the case. So what we're going to try is to make actually sort of the opposite of a usual... fruit production farm so instead of the monocultural trees where you have one kind of fruit that you're specializing in and you know you have to fight a lot of plagues we're going to actually do exactly the opposite we're going to go for a radical diversity in everything so our chickens are a mixed flock of chickens that are laying properly but eventually we just want to sort of naturally select sort of a outside chicken that is sort of this this crazy adapted to this place chicken tough strong outside chicken and the same goes for the trees we're just going to plant so many different varieties of trees and we're just going to select what actually works and what doesn't work and because we have the luxury of planting over 40 kilometers you can over plant and then just see what works and then the i think the beauty of it is that you can market that diversity because we're gonna be able to sell this little baskets of plums in which you can have plums that are all unique because all these trees are unique trees so you can have like a taste experience like every plum you you'll try is different different chocolates for it every year it's like bonbons it's like different colors different tastes different taste experience and that's such a different way of thinking about fruits yeah um and of course we also gonna need to process a lot because with that amount of fruit you have to process a lot. So we're already thinking about how we can turn that into really nice ice cream, how we can process it into jams that we can put in a mid-size shop. So we still have some time, thankfully, to figure out the whole processing part because it's quite challenging on the mid-scale and that's what a lot of farmers are experiencing. But also a lot of other pioneering farmers, landland farmers are also planting trees. So there's also more and more incentive to, as a community starts searching for options to process, to sell, which is great because I think that's what we should do. And yeah, so the market definitely plays a role. What grows here? It should be the start of any conversation. And so that's the fruit. And we're going to have next to the fruits, the garden. We have a small herd of animals that is more supportive and not really such a strong business in itself. So we're going to have probably some cows, but very occasionally some meat, but it's more to enhance the whole system, you could say. And what we really want to do and what we're trying to do is to make sure Why we're also so happy that Dan is on board is the tree nursery. So we want to start a tree nursery. But also a very different kind of thinking about how to grow and sell trees. So instead of selling these big trees with this cut out root, which usually happens. Which is very bad for a tree in a way, to replant trees like that. We want to grow them in air boom boxes. So these are sort of like these simple wooden boxes in which you have an air layer. at the bottom of the box and then soil and compost in the top and then you grow trees from seeds so you also can start growing a lot of diversity in trees and you can also grow certified seeds that are used for example for nature restoration projects but you can also for companies that want to you know compensate their co2 and get actually indigenous trees or fruit production because we want to grow all these beautiful varieties for agroforestry systems that are more and more being sold. So that whole range of trees we want to grow in air prune boxes, which is actually a very simple... thing. But it's just quite fun that something simple could be so different than what we're used to. But it's just a box with an air layer. The tree grows. It hits. The first thing it does, it makes its taproot. It hits the air. And once it hits the air, it stops investing in the taproot and instead goes for the lateral roots. So you get this very strong little tree that in the first year can usually already be... like i don't know 30 40 centimeters and as you can very easily sell as bare root seedlings and that can grow very strong somewhere else and then you can bundle them and and then we can also sell um a little bit in the mid-range so now you see either you buy very small number of trees as um you know a private buyer or when they do huge landscape restoration projects it's only from I don't know, 100,000 or whatever, and we can be in the mid-scale.
- Speaker #0
If there's people listening to this who would like to reconnect to food system, to farmers in their area, what's the best way to go about this?
- Speaker #1
Oh, yeah. I mean, there's so many beautiful things you can look up to. I mean, you can, well, at aadadotfarm, there's a really nice overview of European farms, and you can look up if there's any farm in your neighborhoods. Perhaps you can... and just check out their websites. Perhaps you can go for a farm tour or perhaps you can do a course. Perhaps you, I don't know, do some voluntary work at the farm. Perhaps you can become an apprentice. Perhaps you can even work there. I mean, lots of different options. In the Netherlands, we also have a very beautiful platform. We are the regeneration that now gives sort of an overview of the whole regenerative movement in the Netherlands. So you can just, if anything of that rings with you, you can just look at this beautiful, yeah, almost like a... calendar of beautiful people and initiatives that's happening and it's also on the map so you can also check out if anything is in your proximity and i would really advise just to see if you can get your food from a place nearby that makes you happy and and fat in also other ways you know and it's um and that's also the beauty of it if you talk about soil health it's also our health right it's the reciprocity so if you can find a place where the soil is getting healthier, you're also regenerating yourself by literally eating that, because that also translates into nutrients in your food, in yourself. So yeah, we definitely check out if there's options for buying that kind of food and nourishing yourself with it.
- Speaker #0
So thank you so much for giving me the time. It's the month of May. You're super, super busy with the farm and you took these almost two hours that we spent talking right now. And I really, really appreciate that. And I hope that... the people listening will have gotten a lot of amazing wisdom from that conversation. So thank you so much. Yeah,
- Speaker #1
thanks for being here. And it was really nice to have this conversation with you underneath our beautiful monumental beech tree.
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