Lars Veraart: “Biodiversity knows no borders: all ecological systems are interconnected”

You went from Brabant via Ghent to France and then to Transylvania. How come?

“I was born and raised in the Dutch province of Brabant and knew from the age of four that I wanted to study veterinary medicine. For fifteen years, I worked as a vet in the French countryside among cows, sheep and horses, with my boots on the ground. That suited me perfectly. But the whole system of veterinary medicine and agriculture started to bother me more and more, as I was contributing to the production of more and more meat and pharmaceuticals. Ethically, this became increasingly difficult for me.

My brother was involved in a project in Transylvania, a region in Romania, and asked me to assist him. The small-scale farming there attracted me much more than the intensification in France. People always say to me: ‘You want to go back to the past.’ I don’t, I want to move forward into the future, without throwing away what’s good from our past. I obviously understand that the future is not about farms with two cows and three chickens. But I am convinced that we won’t have any future left if we keep industrialising and intensifying, because in doing so, we are destroying life on Earth. Intensive agriculture – driven by the global economic food system – is one of the biggest contributors to the decline of biodiversity and to environmental and climate destabilisation. So it’s clear that a lot needs to be done to shift how we approach agriculture.

I don’t know anyone who does not want future generations to be able to eat healthy food. Yet most of us are not actively working to make such a future possible. If you really want to contribute to a flourishing Earth with rich biodiversity, then agriculture is one of the key areas we need to transform.” 

What is currently going on in agriculture?

“Everything has to get bigger and bigger. As a result, many farmers have huge loans from the bank. They are stuck, and the use of pharmaceuticals in industrial farming has skyrocketed. Because if you produce animals so intensively, the only way to keep it all going is with a lot of chemicals. Animals naturally know what is good for them. If you have a herd of cattle in a meadow surrounded by a hedge, all sorts of bushes and herbs that are both nourishing and medicinal for them will grow in that hedge. Due to scaling up and monocultures, these kinds of hedges have all disappeared. If you farm on a smaller scale, you can bring that back. That is beneficial for your cattle and for biodiversity. You really don’t have to go back to three cows and a goat; forty cows will do. But two thousand is simply too many.”

Despite being charmed by Transylvania, you returned to France after this project. What finally made you decide to settle in Transylvania?

“I met my partner, who was a psychologist in a large prison. We discovered that we both worked with women behind bars: she for female human prisoners, me for cows. After all, they are also kept behind metal fences. And the same pharmaceutical industries came to us to sell their products… We wanted to live a simpler life, in touch with nature and the Earth, which meant finding a place to practice self-sufficiency and localisation. I knew this would be possible in Transylvania.

Once here, we started Provision Transylvania, a small learning center that offers courses to people who want to reconnect with themselves, others, food and nature. In addition, I became active in other organisations working for ecological agriculture and small-scale farmers, which is how I got into European networks. Inspired by Sjoerd Wartena’s French Terre de Liens, the idea for ALPA was born.”

What problem does ALPA address?

“Here in Romania, I noticed the same that Sjoerd saw in France: old farmers are quitting, the villages are being abandoned and smaller farms are being replaced by large-scale farms. There is a lot of land, and because the plots here are not that big, there are lots of opportunities to start small- or medium-scale farms. But access to land is becoming increasingly difficult due to land grabbing: banks, pension funds, multinationals or very large rich farmers from Western Europe who take the land (often corruptly) to farm intensively on it or for speculation. There is a new generation of young people who do not come from farming families but do want to farm. It is harder for them to start something given these kinds of exploitative practices we find on the ground. 

It is important that smaller farmers also get a seat at the table and have the opportunity to set up a business here. Indeed, Transylvania is Europe’s biodiversity hotspot. The wealth of species in this bioregion is very high by European standards. When I was growing up in Brabant [The Netherlands], there were Sticklebacks in the ditch and the roadside was buzzing with all the insects who lived there. I have seen all that life disappear, and I know that if you plough all the fields and put monocultures on them, the life that is here in Transylvania will also disappear. Biodiversity knows no borders, and all ecological systems are interconnected. So we benefit from that across Europe. With ALPA, we are committed to safeguarding the life we still have.”

What is ALPA doing to help farmers and preserve biodiversity?

“ALPA is one of the European projects associated with the European Access to Land Network: a group of organisations working on access to land. We work on three themes: access to land for agroecological farmers, biodiversity and bioregional regeneration. We buy land to make it available to agroecological farmers, who integrate agriculture with nature. It’s essential to me that we include nature in the way we farm. I don’t understand the debate on whether we should use land for nature or for agriculture, which is currently going on in the Netherlands. There are plenty of methods that prove that farmers can collaborate with nature and thereby regenerate her. Moreover, we know that farmers who take care of biodiversity and their soil also create a more robust and durable economy. And farmers who have livestock and work regeneratively also need much less medicine from the pharmacy. As a former veterinarian, I know how much money that saves.”

How does this work in practice?

“We want to buy at least five farms every five years. So that requires a lot of money. We finance this purchase with donations from citizens, businesses, foundations and philanthropists. At the moment, this is grant money, but we want to move towards a system where people can invest in the work that we are doing. All the land in our foundation is managed agro-ecologically or completely oriented toward nature preservation. Farmers who meet our conditions, who also stand for agroecology, biodiversity and bioregional regeneration, can lease land from us. We ensure that a farm is in good condition and that the farmers can do their work. We want to set up healthy systems that will help them on their way. We also cooperate with European and national networks to help farmers gain knowledge. We plan to set up a training centre so farmers can offer training to other farmers. We also organise activities to connect the local communities, so new farmers land in a warm and welcoming community.”

How do you envision the future?

“Biodiversity is under pressure of vanishing here in Romania. I see the direction it is going and it only seems to be getting worse. That worries me a lot. Yet I also believe in what we stand for with ALPA. It is not so complicated, we are not talking about how to bake bread on Mars. We just need to remember how to make truly good and nourishing bread here on our own planet. This is not so difficult and the solutions are really quite simple. The money is there, we just need to make sure it gets to the right places.

The great thing about Romania, compared to Western Europe, is that you get more land for the same amount of money. In the Netherlands or France, one hundred thousand Euros will get you nowhere, but here in Romania, for that amount of money, you can still buy a farm with ten hectares of land and enormous biodiversity. The whole infrastructure for ecological farming is already present. So if you want to have a positive impact, you are in the right place here in Transylvania. I am driven and hopeful that here we may well succeed.”

Want to know more? Watch this short documentary that our friends from Change the Story made about ALPA. 

Translation by: Robyn Marie Bors Veraart