On Wednesday November 17th we were visited by the Soroptimist Club SallAnders (Raalte-Nijverdal), who came to plant a tree. They did this in the context of 100xTrees4life 2021-2024. We received a beautiful large walnut tree as a gift, which has been given a nice place in the orchard! Of course, the coffee with nut cake should not be missing.
Once a year we remove all the straw manure/compost from the cow shed to be able to use it as valuable manure in the spring. Then we place large bales of straw in the lying area and we can help the cows to distribute the straw. The cows have a lot of fun with this, watch the video below!
The ladies help make the beds themselves. How beautiful do you want it to be?
June 24th, 2021, PoultryWorld will organise a webinar about Sustainable Poultry Production.
In this webinar is Robert one of the speakers and he will talk about Sustainable Poultry Production from farmers perspective. Like all other farms, it is always a challenge to work with new concepts like the Windstreek house and slower growing broilers (Better Live label). and make it profitable.
Follow the link below to get more information
Some time ago recordings were made here from the Eurogroup for animals to show that better welfare for the animals can be economically feasible (with the right concept).This video can been seen on our Windstreek youtube channel.
As a result of this contact, we also had a live stream with members of the European Parliament and the people supporting them, last November 19, 2020. In this we were able to name the advantages of our Windstreek house and show what this looks like in practice with chickens. This livestream was part of a study and discussion morning, see the speakers and topics below.
We recently recorded a podcast for the farmer and data foundation. Below is the article with the link to the podcast. If you click on the orange play button, the podcast will start automatically (in Dutch).
December 17th 2020
PODCAST | Data farmers: poultry and dairy farmer Robert Nijkamp
In the second episode of Data farmers you will hear a conversation with Robert Nijkamp, poultry and dairy farmer from Raalte (O.). Nijkamp stores his data on a so-called flight recorder at his company. This gives him access to his data even without an internet connection.
Yet, according to Nijkamp, there are also advantages of storing the data externally. “If you want to compare your data with colleagues, it makes sense to put the data in the cloud,” says Nijkamp. The poultry and dairy farmer also expects to be able to earn money with his data in the future.
Listen to the second episode of “Data Farmers” below:
Data farmers is a four-part podcast series and is produced by Mechaman in collaboration with the Boer & Data foundation. In this series you hear farmers who have been collecting and using data for a long time. What can you do with the data? Where do you store it? And what are the benefits?
In November 2020, together with a number of (data) farmers in the Netherlands, we founded the Boer en data foundation, together with Farmhack.nl. With the aim of making all data flows that are already there and are yet to come, work for your own company. Regardless of the type of farm you have now, there are already many applications of machines, sensors, devices, portals and apps that produce data. Often there is also a program that converts this data into useful tools, but there is usually no mutual communication. The calculations and / or graphs that help your company are often also just missing.
With the farmer and data foundation, we want to provide our own data projects (in which optimization and support of our companies is paramount), give a stage within agriculture and also work towards (full) data exchange between programs / apps. In addition, we want to use this data to determine ourselves with whom we will share it and what it will be used for.
All in all, a lot to work on and we hope this will also raise agriculture to a higher (data) level
As a farmer you have the privilege to work with animals. And since we have both broilers and cows, nothing is nicer to work with both. It will be completely beautiful when you can see the cows walking in the pasture when the weather is good and the sliding window of the Windstreek house is open!
Of course this also works the other way around, see photo below with the broilers in the barn seen from the cows in the pasture.
A short introduction from our farm, click here …
A farm nowadays is not comparable with a farm from decades ago. To give you an impression of our farm and what we are doing nowadays, we made this website. You will find information about our dairy cows and our broilers and from time to time we publish news about our farm.. By clicking the link below, you will find the farm history .
We had a relatively wet winter, which brought the groundwater level back to normal, after the dry summer of 2019. However, we are now again dealing with a number of very dry months, so that the grass no longer grows. We have now only been able to hgarvest half of the normal amount of grass as silage for next winter. We also see that the turf is already discolouring and the grass is dry and dry.
Of course we are happy with the sun (not only because of the energy yield of our solar panels), but being dry for so long means that we have to buy silage/hay, while we can normally get enough feed from our own land. Hopefully we will get rain soon and we will keep enough grass to keep the cows feeding so that we don’t have to start winter stocking now.
But say it yourself: with a nice sunset and a curious cow you can take a nice picture!
We have been keeping cows for milk since the establishment of the company. Since the (new) construction in 2013, the dairy cows run in a loose housing system. As the picture below shows, the cows walk around in a completely open space, completely scattered with straw. Every day we mix this litter and then we bring a new layer of straw over it. Only behind the feeding rack and at the milking robot and the drinking trough is a (concrete) floor to keep everything well accessible for the cows. More (general) information and information about sustainable energy consumption can be found here
