The Schulte brothers: farming the new old-fashioned way

THE SCHULTE BROTHERS: FARMING THE NEW OLD-FASHIONED WAY WERNER, RANDOLF AND NIELS SCHULTE PARTLY SWITCHED FROM CONVENTIONAL TO ORGANIC CARROT CULTIVATION THIS YEAR AT THEIR FARM IN THE DUTCH TOWN OF SWIFTERBANT. WHILE THEY WERE AT IT, THEY EXPANDED INTO DAIRY FARMING. IT CLOSES A CIRCLE, THEY SAY, IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE. Was Jan Schulte, their now-retired father, a cattle or crop farmer at heart?

In 1961, he started out as a cattle farmer in Friesland. A fire destroyed his farm in 1975 and he restarted as a cattle farmer. However, in the early 1990s, Jan sold his farm. He had a new plan: to start an arable farm – perhaps because he saw that his three sons had farming in their blood.

The family moved to Flevoland.

of labour: Randolf oversees cultivation, Werner concentrates on contract work, and Niels does a bit of everything and took charge of the cows this year. The division isn’t strict, though; they all do whatever needs doing.

Besides a love of the land, the sons have something else in common with their father.

He looked for opportunities and adapted his business accordingly. So do his sons. That’s the

So, cattle or crop farmer? Their dad is both, his sons say. And his genes are evenly divided among them. Werner and Randolf became devoted crop farmers. Niels, the youngest, followed the same path, but cattle farming was in his blood too. So when a farm with about 70 head of dairy cattle went up for sale a few miles down the road, the brothers didn’t hesitate.

They bought it and made it part of their company. So they’ve come full circle: the Schulte family are livestock farmers again.

Going organic

The brothers grow carrots, onions, potatoes, wheat and clover on approximately 120 hectares of land in and around Swifterbant. They also do contract work for other parties, applying crop protection and doing watering and lifting for tulip and carrot growers. There’s a rough division

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From left: Werner, Randolf and Niels Schulte

"Nerac is the most consistent, reliable organic carrot there is."

Randolf Schulte

main reason why they converted around onethird of their acreage to organic farming this year: they saw market demand increasing.

Was the switch difficult? “Not really,” Werner says. “You get advice from all sides. But if we paid attention to it all, we’d probably be out of business by next year. The trick is to filter it.

We have an advantage in that we’ve been growing carrots since the early ’90s, and we’ve also seen a lot in our contract work.”

The biggest changes, in Niels’s opinion, have involved the brothers’ work schedule.

“I’m exaggerating here, but you can grow conventional carrots from your armchair. If you have weeds, you schedule a round of spraying.

You don’t even have to do it on a specific day.

That gives you relative flexibility in your work.

Now we need people to weed. They have to be available. So we have to organize and plan more tightly.”

so it doesn’t rank 10 out of 10. On the other hand, you can sow it from March through June.

It’s the most consistent, reliable organic carrot there is. That’s what we heard from other growers, who we of course consulted before we made the definitive shift.”

Dairy farming: closing the circle

Moving into organic carrots dovetailed perfectly with taking over the dairy farm, which was already organic. One strengthens the other: straw manure from the cowshed can be used in carrot cultivation.

“And that’s how you do circular agriculture, as it’s called nowadays,” Niels says. “We call it old-fashioned with a new name; that’s more our style. But it does close a circle, in more ways than one. And it’s nice for my father, who retired in 2012. He had to choose between crop farming and livestock. There are three of us, so we’re lucky enough to be able to do both.”

Variety: a no-brainer

Once they’d decided to partly switch to organic, the choice of variety was more or less obvious: Nerac. “It’s simple,” Randolf says. “It’s the easiest to sell. Nerac is a bit slower to emerge,

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