Rural Europe on the move English_chap7_13 | Page 63

We were hosted at Warmonderhof
components of a farming system
School Farm which usually teaches as part of a whole, to see them
local and international students the as interrelated and ecologically
theory and practice of biodynamic balanced. Balance was also promoted
farming. Students were off for the in the curating of the workshop over
holidays and we were allowed the three days - a good mix of theory,
to sleep in their rooms and use art and practice, giving and receiving,
their classrooms for our sessions. indoor and outdoor activities. Forum
Biodynamic farming emphasises Synergies had to limit the number of
the need to treat the individual participants. The interest was amazing.
Future Farmers in the Spotlight
PE OP LE !
Joris van der Kamp is a young farmer and a film maker. He discovered Forum
Synergies at the European Rural Sustainability Gathering in Beaufortain in
2014. Joris was fully engaged in running and animating his Future Farmers
project – gathering success stories of young farmers who managed
becoming farmers, also beyond heritage, as newcomers or so-called new
entrants. Joris had gathered a good mixture of independent new farmers and
their success stories from across Europe, who had realized their own visions.
We asked Joris to co-organise a youth workshop at the bio-dynamic farm
school in Dronten, NL, 2015, which has inspired many young people to start
the adventure of becoming a farmer in times of many uncertainties. Joris
and his wife Juliane also tried that same adventure. In spite of a number of
kickbacks, they launched a new farm project near Wageningen, NL.
Greece, France and Spain to meet the teachers and the remaining pupils at
‘Future Farmers in the Spotlight’ had
Joris van der Kamp and his project
pioneers where they live and to record Dronten was contagious. Although
helped to actively involve the young their testimonies. His remarkable short statistics may tell us that young
farmers’ community of the region. film on five farmers telling how to best farmers are on the way to extinction,
He had been a student at Dronten feed and treat their soils ‘Soil farmers’ this place felt like a ‘young farmers
school years before. As founder had convinced Forum Synergies to incubator’, or like an agroecological
of Future Farmers he had been choose Dronten as ‘the place to be’ to magnetic field. Everything looked like
producing remarkable videos of 16 learn from “working with Mother Earth it was falling out of the established
inspiring ‘newcomers to the land’- the biodynamic way.” square forms. The architecture of the
future farmers. He had traveled to
Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Germany,
We did not regret having come school building did not offer any right
here. The engaged, positive spirit of angle, nor did the school’s curriculum.
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