www.forbes.com /sites/christinero/2024/04/27/the-netherlands-a-country-of-livestock-grapples-with-eating-animals/The Netherlands, A Country Of Livestock, Grapples With Eating Animals
Christine Ro14-18 minutes 4/28/2024Cows on Ekoboederij Arink.
Christine RoJohn Arink is in an unusual position: he’s a livestock farmer who believes that people need to eat less meat.
“We have to reduce our animal protein consumption, of course,” says the ruddy, bespectacled John, 33 years to the day after he first milked a cow on this land in the Dutch province of Gelderland. He says this as if it should be obvious, as if it’s natural for a farmer with cows to want consumers to eat less beef.
But he believes that all members of society, farmers included, need to do their part toward a future where humans, animals, and the planet are healthier. “We all have to move in that transition,” he says.
For the last three decades, the farm, Ekoboederij Arink, has had about 50 dairy cows, plus 80 or so beef cattle. These feed mainly on grass from 85 hectares – the bulk of the farm’s land. The farm also has small populations of pigs (living in multiple outdoor pens) and chickens (whose grass enclosure is rotated every week or two around a clever mobile coop that provides light and security).
Keeping the herd sizes modest has advantages for health, John reports. “You can keep the cows without using antibiotics because you don’t have the big concentration of little cows.” Nor is there the combination of diseases that comes from mixing cows that have been trucked in from various parts of the country. “We only have our home diseases, which we can manage very well,” John says.
There’s also the animal welfare dimension: “You can’t treat animals well if you have 10,000 pigs in a barn and 100,000 chickens in a barn,” John emphasizes. “In the end all our animals are for human food. I agree with that, but before that I want to give the animals the best life they can have.”
