Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 150

Historically, the Dutch economy is mainly known for its commercial success. Names like the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and the Amsterdam Exchange Bank may come to mind, more recently (and perhaps less favourably) ABN Amro Bank. Less obvious, but perhaps even more remarkable, however, are the achievements of Dutch farmers. Despite their nation’s small surface and high population density, the Dutch are still among the world’s largest agricultural exporters, at least in terms of value. Jan Bieleman’s book traces the history of this extraordinary success over the past half millennium.

Population densities, which were already high in the Low Countries during the middle ages, were in fact one of the main reasons why Dutch farming became so productive. Urban markets, first in Flanders and Brabant, later in Holland, provided opportunities for farmers in their immediate hinterlands. The soils in those hinterlands were not particularly suited for grain growing, and, as a result, the agricultural sector in these parts switched at an early stage to industrial crops, such as hops, flax and madder, as well as cattle breeding and dairy farming. All this helped to make Dutch agriculture highly commercialized at a relatively early stage. Dutch farmers in the sixteenth century managed to achieve yield ratios that were attained only in the nineteenth century in many other parts of Europe. During the Dutch Golden Age the impact of the urban markets was felt not only in Holland itself, but also in the landlocked provinces that Jan de Vries, in his well-known The Dutch rural economy in the Golden Age (1974), pictured as peasant territory.

Bieleman goes on to demonstrate that the improvements of the Golden Age were maintained after prices declined during the second half of the seventeenth century. Dutch farmers sought their way out of problems through innovation. This would prove to be a recurring pattern. In the nineteenth century, when the Netherlands industrialized late, agriculture was, together with colonial profits, the mainstay of the Dutch economy, and Dutch industrialization was in many regions an off-shoot of the agricultural sector. In that era the early commercialization of Dutch agriculture proved to be an asset once again, as the effects of American grain imports had relatively little impact on Dutch farming, much of which had already moved into other products. The whole idea of applying new technology in farming practices was, moreover, already well-established in the Netherlands’ village communities.

During the nineteenth century, a plethora of public-private initiatives also created a network of institutions devoted to the improvement of Dutch agriculture. One outcome was the establishment of a Veterinary School in Utrecht in 1821, later incorporated into the local university, and a special Agricultural Polytechnic in Wageningen in 1918, which would obtain university status in 1986. These two institutions were to provide cutting-edge knowledge and technology, as well as breeding specimens, for Dutch farmers. In 1935 a Department for Agriculture was created, providing the farming interest with a voice at the Cabinet table.

This produced more government intervention after World War II, when farmers were confronted with mounting labour costs and stagnant prices. Mechanization and increased business sizes were the two main strategies to combat this scissors effect on farmers’ finances, supported by the government and farmers’ organizations. The book has, on pages 354 and 482 two tell-tale pictures. In the first we see the labour force on a 100-hectare farm in 1905, which amounts to over thirty people. On the second we see a farming family of four, including two boys of primary-school age, who together with one hired hand managed to run a 75-hectare farm in 1980. The transformation of farms into agribusinesses was actively stimulated by the government, which in the 1960s took the lead in this process through massive ruilverkavelingen, or ‘plot swaps’, in which plots of agricultural land were re-distributed between farms to create large-size units suited for combines and other machinery, and also ruining the historical landscape in much of the country. The policy was repeated at European Union level by Sicco Mansholt, EU-commissioner 1958–1973, a former Dutch Minister of Agriculture, and one-time farmer himself. It was so successful that soon after all kinds of quotas had to be imposed to limit agricultural production, not mention the dumping of EU farm products on world markets.

Boeren in Nederland ‘Farmers in the Netherlands’ is a new edition of a book first published in 1992 as Geschiedenis van de landbouw in Nederland, 1500–1950. It contains a 100-page additional section on the post-war period, but the rest of the text has also been substantially revised. In many ways this is a new book, superseding its predecessor in all areas. The author is one of the Netherlands’ best-known and most knowledgeable rural historians, much of whose work is unfortunately only available in Dutch. He has been employed in the Department of Agricultural History at Wageningen University, a university devoted exclusively to agricultural studies, home of the famous Wageningen School of rural history, and the AAG Bijdragen with which many readers of this journal will be familiar. Bieleman was able to use a goldmine of books and articles, produced by his current and former colleagues. His own book, as a result, abounds with tables and graphs and detailed analyses of the agricultural developments in the various regions that Bieleman has used to subdivide his material. Although this regional focus allows him to do full justice to the variety of developments, it also somewhat obscures the larger patterns. Some might find the author’s focus on farming methods and business models somewhat narrow. In spite of its title, this book about farmers is definitely not a social history of the farming community.

Nonetheless, this is the only comprehensive study of Dutch agriculture. Given the unique features of the sector in the Netherlands, and the excellent quality of the text, a translation into English would be most welcome. Perhaps some of the detail could be skipped, in favour of a more systematic discussion of the European background, against which this story so clearly stands out.