The Schippers Group: animal welfare as a weapon
Innovative family business steadily conquers the world Constantly looking for new solutions for farming businesses, with a constant focus on animal welfare. It is a condensed version of what The Schippers Group in Hapert, Brabant, stands for. Driven by ‘Let’s beat AMR with HyCare’, the family-run business is steadily conquering the world with products and services that help farmers to farm better. Anyone who regularly drives on the A67 Motorway near Hapert and passes the Kempisch Bedrijvenpark, can’t have failed to notice the 40,000-square-metre new head office of The Schippers Group being built. More than 850 tonnes of steel have been used in the complex, which comprises 400 workstations, a warehouse with fully automated order processing, a car park and a knowledge and information centre. The eye-catching building immediately makes it clear that The Schippers Group has serious ambitions for the future. It’s goal is to play an even bigger role on the national and international agricultural stage than it already does, with the ban on antibiotics in livestock farming as a major spearhead.
then that this move would be the cornerstone for building a multinational company years later. The focus was initially on the tobacco products. He had his shop and, to increase sales, also took his wares outside the town to the many farms. He wasn’t the only one. Grocers and other traders often visited the local farmers because they couldn’t leave the premises unattended during the week. That only happened on Sundays to go to church. And on Sundays the shops were closed. Sympathetic Martien Schippers was soon a welcome guest on the farms. This wasn’t merely because of his sympathetic way of doing business, but also because of his background and his knowledge of life in agriculture. As time went by, he started receiving other requests than just delivering cigars. It is how, without consciously making plans, he became the supplier of the first ear tags in the world when a cattle farmer told him he couldn’t tell his cows apart anymore after the expansion of his farm. Martien Schippers provided him with yellow plastic tags with a string and a number, so that he could earmark the animals. Today, The Schippers Group supplies 300 million ear tags every year to customers around the world.
It took the company just 50 years to reach this point, from where it can co-direct the course for the further progress of intensive livestock farming. The story of The Schippers Group began back in 1966, when founder Martien Schippers – with roots on the farm – lost his job at the artificial insemination station in Hilvarenbeek. His boss came up with a solution: he had a cigar shop in Bladel and offere Martien Schippers to take over the business. Schippers seized the chance and became business owner, supported by and together with his soon-to-be wife.
His curiosity and genuine interest in farming life did the rest. Customers would ask him questions that he could sometimes answer, and other times not. And if he didn’t know the answer, he did research on the subject. Martien Schippers increasingly showed himself to be a visionary. He foresaw that more entrepreneurship would be expected from farmers in the future and responded by looking for new ways to introduce more efficiency into farming businesses. Around 1970, Martien and his
As an enterprising and resourceful man in his twenties, he couldn’t have imagined
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