What is Boerengroep?
Find out more about us and our work
Since 1971, Stichting Boerengroep (Peasants/farmers Foundation) aims to connect the university (students, research, education) with the reality and challenges of farmers and peasants in the Netherlands and worldwide.
“The education at the university was very theoretical and moreover it often gave a wrong impression of the reality of farmers and peasants”
– Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, one of the founders of the Boerengroep.
Therefore Boerengroep started to conduct interviews with farmers. These interviews were then taken into the university where researchers were questioned and stimulated to conduct research on the true needs of the farmers in reality. In 1971, a massive demonstration took place. Half a million farmers were on the streets to protest against the low prices – Boerengroep was there to support them. Until the moment of today, Boerengroep is still fighting for social, just and sustainable food production. We do this by bringing students into the fields and farmers into lecture rooms at the university.
We work together with chairgroups at Wageningen University, like Rural Sociology Group (RSO) and Farming Systems Ecology (FSE), with organisations, like Cultivate, ASEED, Milieudefensie and Toekomstboeren, the organisations of Green Active Network (GAN) Wageningen like St. Otherwise and RUW, international research and advocacy institutes, like TNI and educational institutes like VHL and Warmonderhof. We work closely together with farmers unions, since we are part of platform Aarde Boer Consument (ABC, ‘Earth Farmer Consumer’).
We support and encourage students and PhDers of Wageningen University to organize activities they find important to address, e.g. a symposium or movie screening. Besides this, we are supervising on average 2 interns with Boerengroep, so that students have a place to work on topics they find important to share with others, while gaining work experience, broadening their professional network and having the informative opportunity within an international organization with over 40 years of experience. Moreover, we are actively involved in offering thesis topics to students, that are related to agriculture related challenges of the realities that peasants, farmers, gardeners and indigenous communities face.