About five hundred people came to the Farm on the Dijk in Nagele on Friday evening to harvest their own spinach. They responded to a call via social media from the farmer’s wife, who saw her six hectares of organically grown spinach plants rejected by the buyer last week.
“The spinach has started to bloom,” explains Annemiek Vlaming of Boerderij aan de Dijk. “A number of plants have become stressed, and then the plant wants to reproduce. Then they will make flowers, but I can no longer sell it as leaf spinach.”
Entrepreneurial risk
This resulted in a financial loss of thousands of euros for Fleming. “That’s just an entrepreneurial risk, that can happen and you also take that into account. But I thought it was a shame to plow the field and not do anything with that spinach, which is very good in itself. We can’t get it off the land mechanically, harvesting by hand was possible, but that was impossible for us with six hectares.” So on Wednesday, Vlaming placed an appeal on social media. Those who wanted could come and harvest spinach themselves on Friday evening. A small voluntary fee was appreciated. The call was shared no less than four thousand times. Fleming was overwhelmed by the interest. “I would have been happy if fifty people had come.” It became ten times as many.
Positive spin
The spinach pickers came from far and wide. Many from Noordoostpolder, but there were also people from Zwolle and Het Gooi. “I had seen it on Facebook, and I thought, my son also likes to do it,” said a father who picked a crate and a bucket full with his young child. “This way he sees that the spinach does not come from the supermarket, but from the land.” Fleming was also satisfied. “The fact that we were able to give it a bit of a positive spin is very nice.”
2023-07-09 22:22:14
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