From East Groningen to peasant protests: The Grain Republic in miniature

26 February 2021

Introduction

In 2019, my parents moved to Oldambt municipality. This is a municipality in the east of Groningen province. Oldambt is pretty easy to describe: you have Winschoten in the south with Blauwe Stad against it. If you walk north from Winschoten, you only pass through farmland, some villages and eventually you step right into the Dollard. In this respect, Oldambt fits the typical image of East Groningen: rather empty. East Groningen is therefore known as one of the poorest regions of Groningen. In the whole area of about 186,000 inhabitants, you could just fill one seat in the Lower House. At least, if they all voted for the same person. So what is so interesting about Oldambt that I am writing an article about it? My mother gave me the book The Grain Republic, which describes a history that starts in Oldambt, but gives a glimpse around the world. Indeed, it turns out that Oldambt is a cradle of ancient communist movements, land reclamation from the sea and peasant protests with one local as the protagonist, someone who had enormous influence on our society: Our Dear Sicco Mansholt.

In the beginning

The agricultural area north of Winschoten is thus adjacent to the Dollard. However, all that land didn't used to be there. Centuries ago, the Dollard occupied a much larger area, so often the water took up even more space for a while. This meant that farms and villages were regularly wiped off the map. It also meant that you could take your boat from Scheemda straight into the North Sea. From the late Middle Ages, around 1500, until 1979(!), people were busy reclaiming the Dollard bit by bit and making sure the area no longer flooded. The soil extracted from this proved to be enormously fertile and Oldambt soon became known as the granary of the Netherlands. Hence the name The Grain Republic.

It was no fun in Oldambt's Grain Republic. Farming was extremely labour-intensive before the advent of machinery. As a farmer, you needed a small army of farm workers to sow, harvest and manage all the grain. However, this did not mean that those farmers there in Oldambt had it bad. Because land reclamation yielded so much fertile, and free, land, the farmers there became considerably rich. These farmers were also called land farmers or gentleman farmers. This is therefore reflected in the farms scattered around the landscape in Oldambt. If you were to think away the stable, you would soon be left with a villa. This is in contrast to the farm workers who had no land of their own and were thus hired for work by the gentleman farmers. There are two remarkable features to this. First, these farm labourers had to live close to their gentleman farmer, in barren huts of which nothing remains today. This led to a society where rich peasants and poor labourers did live close to each other, but avoided each other as much as possible. The book writes about how the peasant children went to tennis, while the labour children went to play football. That workers were not welcome during church services if peasants were present. Perhaps you can understand that this dichotomy generated some frustration, and it certainly did.

The uprising

It was the mid-nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. With this came labour movements in factories and mines by workers there demanding better wages and living conditions. However, in East Groningen, the revolution was hard to find. The only technical highlights were the potato factories of Willem Albert Scholten, known for that cute little teahouse near the Main Station. Despite the fact that it was thus agricultural land, the agricultural workers also revolted. Together they organised meetings and strikes, demanded higher wages and printed their own magazines. Most gentlemen farmers were vehemently opposed to this rebellion of the farm workers, but there were a few exceptions. One of these exceptions was Derk Mansholt, Sicco Mansholt's grandfather. Even though he was a gentleman farmer, Derk read and wrote an enormous amount about other economic issues from a farmer's point of view. Perhaps the viewpoint he was best known for was that he wanted all farmland to be owned by the government and farmers should then lease it.

Even without all these new ideas and protests, these were already difficult times for arable farming. From 1880, due to new steamships, a huge amount of cheap grain arrived from the US. This caused grain prices to plummet enormously, so most European countries put tariffs on US grain. The exception to this was the Netherlands, which reduced the income of gentleman farmers. As a result, they therefore also had to lay off many farm workers, which in turn caused further poverty and misery. Highlighting this were the uprisings in 1892, where arson, vandalism and violence were not shunned. At that time, tensions ran so high that the army was deployed.

The world wars

Slowly, the income of gentleman farmers rose again. At first, this was not because grain prices returned to normal levels, but simply because production went up. With threshing machines and fertilisers, the gentleman farmers began to earn enough to hire farm workers again. The unrest of 1892 had not been forgotten after all. The labour movement, whose main political party was Troelstra's SDAP, had the wind in its sails. For those who thought actual revolution was a better way to seize power, there was the infamous preacher Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. Yet the gentleman farmers also tried to give something to the farm workers, partly out of sympathy, but also out of fear of more violence. But all this changed when the German Empire attacked.

World War I broke out and while almost all of Europe was shooting itself to pieces, the Netherlands remained neutral. Grain prices skyrocketed, but fertiliser imports from Germany ceased. Given that at the time fertilisers were seen as a panacea, most farmers in the Netherlands were soon heavily dependent on them. As an exception were the farmers in Oldambt, whose already naturally fertile clay soil, formerly Dollard, allowed them to produce more than enough. This caused the income of gentleman farmers to skyrocket.

The war also had another consequence. The misery of the war gave not a wind, but a hurricane in the sails of the labour movement across Europe, and it certainly gave off in the Netherlands. The highlight was the creation of the Soviet Union in Russia. This gave enormous inspiration to the agricultural workers in Oldambt, suddenly it appeared possible that the worker could actually seize power. Many therefore expected Germany to soon follow and perhaps with it, the Netherlands. Especially after World War I, when it appeared that the Soviet Union would stay, tensions between the farm workers and the gentleman farmers ran high again. Here, the 1929 strike can be considered the peak. Except for some crumbs, the gentleman farmers did not want to concede anything to the farm workers, especially when the price of grain fell again after the war. What the farm workers mainly did was strike during the summer. This is when the grain had to be harvested and if it was not done on time, the gentleman farmers would lose almost their entire annual income. In response to the strike, the gentleman farmers hired other workers, mostly Christians, from other parts of the Netherlands. They also did not shy away from hiring thugs to make life difficult for the strikers. On the other hand, the strikers were not averse to violence either, even on the people hired in their place by the gentleman farmers. Bear in mind that there was an actual fear among the peasants that there would be a revolution that would take away all their property and with it their lives and they were not waiting for that.

Just before World War I, in 1908, Sicco Mansholt was born. His parents, a rare combination of socialists and gentleman farmers, were themselves hugely politically active. His father sat for the SDAP in the Provincial States of Groningen and his mother was one of the first women to study political science, after which she organised meetings for women. Sicco soon became inspired by his grandfather's writing, which taught him about his ideas on how agriculture should be drastically different. After his studies and a short stay in Java, Sicco started his own farm in the brand-new Wieringermeer polder in North Holland. This polder was hugely tightly planned with even the type of residents being chosen who could live and work where. Like his parents, Sicco became active in local politics in this municipality and began further developing his grandfather's ideas on politics and agriculture.

During World War II, Sicco joined the resistance. He ensured that food aid reached other places and took people in hiding into his care. Towards the end of the war, the German occupation forces surrounded North Holland, with the only escape route being via the Afsluitdijk. To slow down a Polish tank brigade in their pursuit, local German occupiers pierced the dike of the Wieringerpolder. This flooded whole areas of farmland, villages and farms, including Sicco's farm.

Reconstruction

Just one month after the war was over in the Netherlands, Sicco was asked by then-PvdA prime minister Wim Schermerhorn to become minister for agriculture, fisheries and food supply. With that, as a 37-year-old, he was then relatively very young. Sicco was known for his managerial talent, which was sorely needed. There was food available for just one week(!) in the Netherlands. Sicco pulled all the strings at that point and was able to prevent a famine. At first, Sicco planned to be minister for only two years, simply to deal with the toughest difficulties just after the war. However, Sicco turned out to like the job so much and be good at it that he was able to stay on in the same position for several cabinets until 1958.

His ministership revolutionised Dutch agriculture. The measures Sicco introduced were economies of scale, heavy investment and research for improvement, import duties on foreign agricultural products and a minimum price guarantee for crops. Because of the improvements and the economic security that the price guarantee gave, food production in the Netherlands soared and Sicco became ridiculously popular. Suddenly farmers did not have to worry about a sharp decline, but all that investment also replaced the last farm workers with tractors and machines. As a result, workers moved away from the countryside. Soon the whole conflict between farm labourer and gentleman farmer disappeared as if it had never existed.

In the 1950s, it soon became clear that the Netherlands was too small for Sicco. The other European countries also started setting agricultural tariffs following the Dutch example. Sicco wanted to do what he did for the Netherlands at the European level. Soon after he left his ministry, he became the first commissioner for agriculture in the European Commission. Suddenly, a Groningen farmer from Oldambt is at the top of Europe. By meeting precisely for so long that his opponents got fed up with it, Sicco was able, with the necessary compromises, to draft the agricultural policy in Europe that we are now familiar with. Now farmers throughout the European Community were guaranteed enough money for their produce. And if too much was produced, it was simply bought up with European tax money. At the time, the concept of too much food was unknown, but that soon changed.

The monster of Mansholt-stein
The entire introduction of subsidies, laws and innovations were successful, too successful. Agriculture in Europe produced more butter, wine and olive oil than it could consume itself. The price guarantee allowed farmers to just keep producing without making a loss. Any surpluses were bought up by the European Community and shipped to poorer countries, for instance. This was budgeted as export subsidies. At first glance, it didn't sound like a bad idea, dumping surplus food in areas where people didn't have much. However, this caused food prices in these poorer areas to fall, leaving farmers there with precisely insufficient income. On the other hand, the amount under export subsidies huge. Meanwhile, it also became known that this industrial way of farming was a veritable apocalypse for nature in Europe. This was in the late 1960s, over 50 years ago at this point, but still hugely topical. Mind you, it's getting even more topical.

Sicco began an affair in the 1970s with then intern Petra Kelly, who would later found the Green Party in Germany, Die Grüne. Under her influence, the farmer from Groningen realised what a monster he had created. Through the trauma of food shortage in World War II, Europe had created a political machine that turned fragile nature and taxpayers‘ money into butter that won't even be eaten. From never hunger to abundance. He tried to pull the plug, but the entire agricultural sector had already become too addicted to the rules and subsidies. Of Europe's 10 million farmers, Sicco thought half could go for another job. But telling a farmer to cut back or even quit, that is not so kindly received. With loads of milk and wine, farmers from all over Europe marched to Brussels to protest against the new measures. In revolt, they dumped their surpluses in the middle of the city, leaving entire streets flooded with grape and cow juice. Only a decades after Sicco quit his position in the European Community were the first agricultural quotas introduced. A well-known example is the 1984 milk quota, which was scrapped in 2015.

Back in Oldambt, innovations in agriculture also took off. On the Dollard polder land, the world record of grain per hectare was broken while whole tribes of farm workers had left. Now there was only one farmer left per farm who, sometimes with a family member during harvest, looked after endless tracts of land. After all this scaling up, success tasted like more. Plans were made to convert even more Dollard into farmland, along with the necessary canals for seafaring. However, in the city of Groningen and other parts of the country, other voices began to rise. It became increasingly clear that the Dollard, as part of the Wadden Sea, is an important habitat for birds and other life in the Netherlands. This also started the modern conservation movement as a counterweight to agriculture. After endless protests, no agricultural expansion in Oldambt came after all, and farmland was even flooded again. The Blauwe Stad, an artificial lake north of Winschoten. It is a natural and recreational lake where housing is also being added. As you can imagine, there was plenty of local protest against it, as it involves farmland for which centuries were fought against the sea, only to turn it into water for nature and recreation.

Meanwhile, after Sicco left the European Community, he started focusing more and more on conservation. This was seen by many farmers as something of a betrayal. Still, Sicco tried to use his name recognition and influence for the green cause, also due to the huge guilt he felt for having created the monster. In the end, the founder of Agrarian Europe died with regret at the age of 86 in Wapserveen, Drenthe. The modern history of agriculture in Oldambt, the Netherlands and Europe and its consequences are still present in our society. A history created by a Groningen farmer of whom many memories remain. For those who want to learn more about it, read the book The Grain Republic By Frank Westerman.

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