Dear Customer,
As I was driving down the road this week, I saw my neighbour Guustaaf getting water from the ditch to refill his watering equipment. I hit the brakes and stopped to talk to him: Come rain or come shine, Guustaaf is always in a good mood, and I wanted to see how he was doing.
We were far from done with our conversation once he had enough water, so I joined him on his tractor. I don’t use them myself, and these tractors equipped with all this irrigation machinery are enormous things, so I was curious to see what it looked like from up there in the cabin. We see loads of agricultural equipment passing by every day, but these things are some of the most impressive ones around. I had not given it much thought before, but suddenly I could not think of a better thing to do than to get a bird’s view of all those rows of onions Guustaaf was working on.
Around the Belkmerweg, were we live, and then all throughout the sandy soil in the northern part of our province and on the other side of the IJsselmeer-lake in the Flevopolder, lots and lots of small onions are grown. They aren’t grown into the kinds of onions you buy into the supermarket. They are the small ones you get at a gardening center to plant in your own garden to grow them yourself. After they’ve been in your own garden, they are ready to be onion soup.
Guustaaf was also going in the right direction for me: I was on my way to check on the miniature Daffodils, as my son Karel had asked if they were ready to be dug up yet. Getting into a tractor like this is kind of like climbing into one of those small planes. The cabin also feels like a cockpit: There are endless buttons and levers. Modern agricultural equipment is a technological heaven. The newer machines have every kind of system imaginable. One of my personal favourites is relatively simple: The GPS pilot. You do not have to use the steering wheel at all anymore, in fact, it is better if you don’t. The tractor itself knows where to drive and can create perfectly straight pathways, perfect in a way that is impossible to achieve for a human being driving, and this obviously is a fantastic way to get as much use out of the land as possible, and to be as precise as you can be when calculating what to plant where. Not a drop of water is wasted this way, and not a single onion is left out, as the tractor retraces its own path from when it planted the onions to begin with.
Another fun fact is that the nozzles at the end of the pipes know where the wind is coming from. They use that information to then blow the water—or other treatment—lightly against the wind in order to get as much of whatever liquid it’s giving onto the crops. The pressure is also adjusted very carefully: The nozzles hang exactly 30 centimeters above the crops, and the velocity at which the liquid is pushed from the pipes is adjusted tot he point where it will naturally come to a stop after those 30 centimeters. This means that you can use as little agent as possible, which is good for both the environment and your own finances. It’s always nice to see that at least some of our technological advancements are in fact used to make things better.
As you can tell, I was very impressed, and asked Guustaaf what this whole thing costs. Do you want to guess before reading on? If you were to buy a perfectly new version of this tractor and machine, you’d have to pay somewhere between four- and five hundred thousand euros. Almost half a million! You can imagine my face when Guustaaf told me of his other tractor that was even newer—this one isn’t even the most advanced ones around.
Then Karel called to ask if I’d already seen the Daffodils. He wanted to know if he could call the contractor to dig up the Daffodils. He could, and Karel called Sven, who also coincidentally is Guustaaf’s son and about Karel’s age. I told Guustaaf about the call. Beautiful, isn’t it? Our boys slowly starting to take over. Just a few more years, we said to each other, and we’ll get to be on the other side of those dunes lazing around on the beach while they can be in charge. They’ve been working towards it for years, and Guustaaf and I are already looking forward to it. If the next few years are going to fly by like these past ones did, we’ll be outside somewhere reading a book and drinking wine and whiskey, in almost no time at all.
As we were talking like old men, the job was finished before we knew it. The entire crop had been treated. The stuff we used was a preventative biological agent. Nowadays, the preventative measures we take are almost always fully biological. This one is meant to protect the crops from insects and mold, and it has a couple of nutrients in it for the plants themselves, too. If there is a disease or somehing affecting the crops, chemical products are unfortunately still necessary, but over the years, we have seen a lot of improvement in how to biologically keep everything healthy. Another thing we are looking forward to seeing our sons improve even further. I really do hope the next generation will be able to fully make using chemical products unnecessary.
But let’s take a look at these onions. This is Snowball, a white little onion with a pleasant flavour but still a bit of a spicy zing to it. It’s very popular in eastern Europe. They survive the winter: They are usually planted in October, and you can get some harvest during the winter if you’re lucky. You could remove the first leaves and use it as spring onion or chives. Later, in June or July, the fat onions can be harvested. They look good. In a week or two, this field will be dug up and sent out into the world.
I have to say something related to my own business in this newsletter, so here goes: We are almost ready to dig the Daffodils. When they are into the warehouse, we will be processing them. You can order them right now in our Fluwel Special Narcissus shop. So if you have a wishlist of special Daffodils laying around somewhere… I think you should use it soon. I will know for sure next week, but Monday, July 14 will probably be the last day to order our Special Narcissus varieties. We have to take out all of the bulbs we sold while processing them, so as soon as that happens, the store has to close. I’ll keep you updated. They seem to be doing well, and I am hoping for a very good harvest this year.
Our regular Fluwel assortment will remain available even when the Fluwel Special Narcissus shop closes. You will be able to order those bulbs until well into autumn.
Time to get back to work.
Kind regards,
Carlos van der Veek
