New Alliances on Farmland: Balancing Scalability and Local Empowerment on Herenboeren farms in the Netherlands

Abstract

"Community supported agriculture is a growing social movement that seeks to find solutions for contemporary challenges in agriculture, through collaboration between producers and consumers. With the creation of direct relations between consumers and farmers the movements creates opportunities to revitalize local agricultural economies, preserve farmland, improve community food security, and educate consumers about farming and the environment. One of such movements are the Herenboeren Farms in the Netherlands. The idea of Herenboeren is that 200 households collectively buy a farm and employ a farmer, who will cultivate food for the 200 owners. In five years the movement has expanded rapidly from one to ten Herenboeren farms in the Netherlands, all following the same principles, safeguarded by the umbrella organisation Herenboeren Nederland. Through ethnographic research on two Herenboeren farms I try to find an answer to the question: How do Herenboeren communities transform a standardized model into local practice, and how can this local practice of the Herenboeren model help us study the precarious balance between necessary simplification on the one hand and local empowerment on the other? Suggesting that the use of a standardized model inherently needs some form of simplification I argue that the model of Herenboeren has the tendency to overlook essential features of the Herenboeren farms, that develop in practice. On of such overlooked practices is the process of immaterial commoning. I suggest that the practice of immaterial commoning creates and needs a shared sense of morality that can be interpreted as a new moral economy in the making. As such, the local practise of Herenboeren actually goes beyond the expectations of the model, that primarily aims at increasing conscious consumption. Within the practice of immaterial commoning another awareness emerges, and shared ethical considerations that go beyond conscious food consumption are slowly taking shape through shared experience. "