Project

Toekomst van de landbouw (Future of agriculture)

Against the backdrop of increasing societal pressure to farm in more sustainable ways, this project aims to understand the identities, belongings, passions, experiences and insecurities of young (younger than 35), conventional dairy farmers in the Netherlands.

I aim to hear the voices of those not frontrunning in the transition of Dutch agriculture, also not of those who do not envision any change, but for the voices of a ‘silent middle group’, who want to move forward but are often stuck in strangling legislations, troubled finances, but also socio-cultural views on what a ‘good farmer’ is and ought to be. I aim to understand how they move the future of agriculture forwards by investigating what visions they have about what the(ir) future should look like, what motivates them for these futures and what challenges they encounter.