Rural leaders travel to the Netherlands for 'innovation safari'

Rural Leaders travel to the Netherlands for ‘innovation safari’

Rural Leaders from Scottish Enterprise recently visited the Netherlands with a Rural Youth Project delegation from across Scotland to embark on an “Innovation Safari” exploring rural-urban relationships.

The many visits featured agri-tourism, hospitality, food producers, innovators, community supported agriculture, HAS University and the world’s first floating farm.

Jeremy Parker of NFU Mutual’s Forfar Agency shares some key themes from the trip.

Food and the growth of the City

“The Netherlands can be viewed as a city of 17m people with co-ordinated spatial planning across provinces. Land use around and within the city should contribute to the health and wellbeing of its inhabitants. The concept of Urban Farming brings production closer to consumption and includes the use of redundant industrial buildings, brownfield sites, green corridors and vertical farms.”

Social impact & community engagement

“This was important for most of the businesses that we visited and it is proudly regarded as a measure of business success and growth. One farm operated in partnership with the local health authority to put 80 people at a time through a six-week programme, as part of their treatment for addictions or mental health issues whilst still operating as a commercial farm for fruit, vegetables and egg production.”

A culture of innovation, collaboration and entrepreneurship

“New thinking and new models are just as important as technical innovation. Increasingly businesses are finding their growth opportunities away from the current mainstream and within an expanding “sea of niches.” Hubs and clustering encourage collaboration.”

Circular Economy & sustainability

“There’s an acceptance of the need to work with the sustainability agenda and resultant changes in consumption behaviours. Kipster Farm’s poultry feed used “residual flows” from large bakeries, reducing their carbon footprint by 50%. Even municipal verge cuttings don’t have to be waste. Cut-and-collect machinery sends grass feedstock to Anaerobic Digestion plants for gas or electricity production, both reducing the net public cost of trimming and reducing the land taken out of food production for this purpose. Koppert Cress has seven hectares of glasshouses, but sustainability objectives mean that, as they develop faraway markets, they look to establish local glasshouses to keep use of airfreight to a minimum.”