Is this Crisis the end of Small Family Farms?

In March 2019 I shot an item about plastic recycling with this small family farm as the decor.

Now, a year later the world has turned upside down. With the whole Coronavirus COVID-19 situation and the coming economic crisis ahead, I’m wondering if there is any future for small family farms like these.

This is the small Kouperus’ family farm in Friesland, the Netherlands is run by father, mother, and son. They have a whole bunch of grown-up sheep and baby sheep, grazing and running around freely. And they have 20 milk cows, or so.

Two times a day, the cows are milked. Not in a massive industrialized way with state of the art machines for more efficiency. Just one by one.

I’m not a farmer. But for what I can see, the cows have plenty of space to stand or lay down. They have plenty of food and can eat whenever they’d like too and shit whenever they please. And, as I’ve been told, during summer, these cows will walk around freely in the world-famous green dutch grass fields.

Small family farms like his one are a rare breed though. A day worth of milk fits in this fairly small container and together with the sheep and selling Christmas trees as a side hustle during winter, this family earns just enough to make ends meet.

In a quickly changing landscape, I hope that we are not only pushing for commercially, more, bigger, larger, better and efficient. I hope that we can go the other way, to smaller and more personal, where there’s still a face and place for people to take time to do what they love.