Ex-pig farmer makes relaunch with Salmon Farm Maashorst
Stop? Pig farmer John Wijdeven (54) was totally unaware of that. He was running technically bést, with his six thousand fattening pigs. Nevertheless, he participated in the Subsidieregeling sanering varkenshouderijen (SRV) for short, the sanitation scheme.John is now switching from pigs to fish: the Uden native’s yard will soon be home to the Netherlands’ first indoor salmon farm. It will be operated by John’s associate Rob Dortmans. “Fresh Dutch salmon just isn’t there,” John states. “All the farmed salmon comes from Norway or Scotland. Before it gets here, that salmon is three, four days old.”
Top three in terms of feed cost per kilogram of growth
John Wijdeven was very keen on numbers from a young age. “If I learned one thing from my father, it’s that you always have to record everything in pig farming. If you raise 100 piglets and you deliver 98, that means two have died. If you don’t record anything, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” John laughs, “My father put in a new barn in 1985. I was 17 at the time. A supplementary feeding installation came in and we could keep exact track of the results ourselves. That was still in MS-DOS, with one of those black screens with those green letters. But we could program how much feed we distributed per section. We entered the laying weight and the delivery weight and calculated daily growth, feed conversion and feed costs per kilogram of growth. Delivering on Wednesday, we had the slaughter data by Thursday or Friday. Friday afternoon you knew what you had earned, that round.” That focus on the technical ratios never disappeared. As figures from the Agrovision accounting program Pigmanager show, John has been among the top three in terms of feed cost per kilogram of growth for the last 15 years.
Pig farmer-off
And yet he is now a pig farmer. John tells how that turned out. “Marco Hol, my advisor at DLV Advies, came to me for something completely different. I don’t remember what for, but it was in August 2019. He threw the ball up: there was a buyout scheme coming up, based on the odor standard.” That was the SRV. “Well I’m here in Uden right along the A50. The village is across the highway. I then inquired with the Oost-Brabant Environmental Service: it turned out I was in spot 20 of the pig farms with the most odor nuisance. They draw a 1 kilometer circle around your farm. We are only 600 meters from Uden as the crow flies, so there were quite a few civilian homes in our circle.”
Two air scrubbers
On top of that, John saw hefty investments coming his way that would bring no business benefit. “I had one air washer that was licensed in 2009. I would have to replace that one by 2024 at the latest. In addition, I had one barn with flush gutters; that system was no longer sufficient according to the rules of the province of Brabant. I would also have to buy an air scrubber for that by January 1, 2024.” Two investments that together would require at least 2.5 tons, without bringing him even 1 gram of additional daily growth. John counted his buttons. “You start thinking. I have two daughters and a son, but there is no takeover candidate. And in itself I can handle the work just fine now, but loading pigs is pretty tough. I deliver three hundred every week; of those, I have to conduct at least 150 out of the pen with the knee behind the bulkhead.”
Amount per square meter
In the SRV scheme, production rights are taken over for the then current market value. Furthermore, you get an amount per square meter, depending on the age of the barn. John has always continued to develop the pork farm. The oldest stable dated from 1985. Subsequently, stalls were added in 1990, 1998, 2004, 2010 and 2016. “Marco pre-calculated me what I could pretty much receive for this, and that was a nice sum in my eyes. When I mentioned that amount to my father, his first reaction was: have you signed already? Soon the money will be gone!”
‘All cooperation from RFO’
And John signed on. Together with Marco, he initiated the application. “We did get on the phone with RVO because of the deadline by which participants in the sanitation scheme had to have stopped. I have a contract with a regular piglet breeder, with six months’ notice. But the RFO gave every cooperation,” he says.
Salmon farming
But as John ended his pig farm, another branch of “animal husbandry” came his way: salmon farming. Rob Dortmans, the friend of John’s niece and godson Melanie, had the idea of starting a land-based salmon farm in the Netherlands. Dortmans chose a master’s degree in Aquaculture after his bachelor’s degree in animal science at Wageningen UR and now wants to conquer the Netherlands with fresh salmon. The first Dutch indoor salmon farm is to be built in Uden, on godfather John’s farm: Salmon Farm Maashorst.
Collaboration between two companies
Salmon Farm Maashorst will be a collaboration between two companies. Rob will run the salmon farm. Around it will be an area with hospitality, recreation and education. That will be the pakkie-an of John. The province of North Brabant and the Uden City Council are wildly enthusiastic about the plans for high-quality local food, combined with a slice of hospitality and education. Licensing did have some issues. “After all, salmon farms like we want to do here, in large basins, do not yet exist in the Netherlands.” The permit is now virtually complete. Construction should be able to start in May, the Uden entrepreneur expects.
Salmon farm Maashorst
As the demand for healthy, sustainable and locally produced products continues to grow, and with increasing pressure on conventional animal farming (due to nitrogen emissions, odor nuisance and CO2 emissions, among other things), it becomes more important than ever to find an efficient way to produce our food that has no negative impact on the environment, is environmentally friendly, technologically and economically feasible and socially acceptable.
Salmon farm Maashorst is currently in the process of creating the first salmon farm in the Netherlands. Through smart production methods and innovative filtration systems (in-house developed purification, monitoring and process control systems), we are able to provide the best animal conditions year-round, have no negative impact on the environment and manage to do so without the use of antibiotics and chemicals.
In addition, we want to engage in the transition of the agricultural sector and develop a current pig farm into a salmon farm. With this alternative and efficient form of food production (without odor, dust, nitrogen or noise pollution) we achieve more than 93% CO2 reduction compared to former pig farming and 75% CO2 reduction compared to salmon from Norway. More than 96% ammonia reduction is also achieved (>6,000 kg/year) compared to pig farms, minimizing nitrogen deposition.
The farmed salmon will be sold entirely locally (in NL), as this fits with the sustainable way of breeding and selling that we aspire to. At 80 tons annually, the production of this salmon farm is < 0.5% of the current Dutch demand for salmon.
Together with leading institutions such as the WUR, Department of Aquaculture and Fisheries, Witteveen+Bos, Breukrand BV, Boerschappen, The Good Fish Foundation and various suppliers, we are working together to further develop the salmon farm in the best possible way in order to make a positive contribution to the transition to a more sustainable food system. In this, the salmon farm has a facilitating role between institutes and companies in which exchanging knowledge and building on each other’s expertise plays an essential role.
General objective: “To have the first Dutch land-based, nature-inclusive, animal-friendly and most modernly managed salmon farm operational at Uden (on a former pig farm) within 3 years, with at least 80 tons of salmon being farmed, processed and sold in the region on an annual basis.”
OPZuid project objective: “To test, validate and fine-tune the in-house developed and designed land-based freshwater salmon rearing system at commercial scale, from egg to adult fish.”
Salmon Farm Maashorst: “a healthier and more sustainable future for our nature and society.”
EU strategic project
The European grant makes it possible to establish a good concept all at once, according to Rob Dortman, salmon farm operator.
The site on Lageburchtweg is already taking shape and there is a large sign on the street side saying that this project was made possible with European Union money. Europe is paying 850,000 euros for the nursery, with the province supplementing that amount to one million.
,,The European subsidy makes it possible to establish a good concept in one go, where we do not have to make concessions on quality or animal welfare. Of course, we are very happy about that,” Dortmans had the grant maker note.
544 million euros
The salmon farm in Uden is one of 628 projects in North Brabant that have received a total of 544 million euros in European funding over the past three-plus years. That money comes from 21 different pots and accounts for ten thousand jobs.
The review of EU subsidies to Brabant comes out ahead of next week’s European elections. That list also includes 788 million euros in loans from the European Investment Bank for Brabant initiatives. Some of that money is for sustainability projects.
Europe’s grant money is intended, among other things, to spur innovation and reduce nitrogen emissions. A few other projects benefiting from the European grant: Monkeys by the Sea which works in Bergen op Zoom on vegetarian alternatives to fish (over 900,000 euros) and VivArt-X which contributes from Eindhoven to tissue repair after breast surgery (almost 500,000 euros).
Tiny fish
So in Uden, European money goes to salmon farming. Which emits 96 percent less nitrogen than the pig farm did. It also saves on emissions that the fish no longer has to travel halfway across Europe before landing on a plate somewhere in the Netherlands. Today, farmed salmon often come from Norway or Scotland and are often days away.
Salmon farm Maashorst will farm the fish itself in Uden and sell it in the region. The fish are raised in fresh water so that their poop can serve as fertilizer on surrounding plots. That would be impossible with salt water.
The breeding process has been going on for a while, with fertilized salmon eggs flown from Iceland to Brabant last summer. Tens of thousands of tiny fish first swam in a nursery pond in Odiliapeel before they could make their way to Uden. At the salmon farm, they have to grow through to the “market weight” of 4.5 kilograms before they end up as day-fresh fish on a plate in the neighborhood. Courtesy of Europe.
OPZuid ERDF 2021-2027
South Netherlands’ ambition with the ERDF program 2021-2027 (OPZuid) is to implement the RIS3 priorities and thus leverage and strengthen regional strengths on economy, entrepreneurship and innovation, with social and economic impact as a goal. This involves contributing to innovative solutions to five major social transitions taking place both in the southern Netherlands and globally, and enabling market players to take advantage of (inter)national market opportunities. The five transitions concern energy, climate, commodities, agriculture & nutrition and health
A Dutch farmer produces the world’s first ice cream made from pig’s milk
Erik Stegink has created a “pig’s milk ice cream” and the delicacy is a hit with visitors to his Piggy’s Palace farm, where they can also see the animals on slides, reports Britain’s The Times. The taste takes some getting used to, but the world’s first ice cream made from pig’s milk is a hit in the Netherlands.
Erikt Stegink, a farmer from the village of Bathmen in the Overijssel region started making ice cream. The new delicacy, called “pig ice cream,” is a hit with visitors to Stegink’s farm “Piggy’s Palace,” where visitors can have a “pig-nic” and watch their pigs play on slides, writes Romanian G4Media.ro. “People really like it, we were almost through the first supply,” he told local TV station East. The ice cream is described as “a little greasy, nice and creamy.” “It’s delicious ice cream,” said one visitor to the farm. Goat milk ice cream is widely available in the Netherlands and, according to NOS, camel ice cream has been on sale since 2011. Pig’s milk is more similar to breast milk than cow’s milk in terms of lipids or fats, with a stronger taste described as “gamey.” It contains about 8.5% fat, compared with 3.5% in cow’s milk. In 2015, Stegink’s farm was the first in the world to commercially produce pork milk cheese in a production process that he said was “a hell of a lot of work. 
“It takes so much time and so many liters for one kilo of cheese, it becomes very expensive. This ice cream also takes time, but we need less milk for it,” he said. His 250 sows must be hand-milked because no machines have been developed for milking pigs, as it was considered commercially unfeasible in the past. “A sow gives milk about 12 to 14 times a day. The pigs are there, but the farmer is also ‘in between,'” he said. “The teat we ‘undress’ by hand. We collect the milk in a small container. The piglets here also drink from several other sows, so they are never short of anything
