First Newbie award winner

On January 24, Andries Visser, coordinator of the Newbie project handed out the first Dutch Newbie award at the yearly organic agriculture fair in Zwolle, the Netherlands. The award was given to Els Hegger and Stefan Landstede of the farm “de Mobiele Gaard” which can be translated as “The mobile garden”. The Dutch steering committee of Newbie who selected the winner, motivated the choice of “de Mobiele Gaard” as follows: they show courage and creativity when setting up a completely new concept. With this concept they have found a solution to a major problem that many new entrants face: access to land. “De Mobiele gaard” has developed a mixed farm of 18 ha (vegetables, chickens & pigs) in which they do not own the land but use the land of various landowners. The farm has 8 different locations with 5 different landowners. They pay no rent but in exchange for the use of the land they give 10% of the harvest to the owner. As a result, the costs are low and therefore they succeeded in getting an income from this company within two years. They do not have a guarantee for the land, so the arrangement can stop every year, but it showed that a lot of people have small pieces of land available for these kind of initiatives. Els and Stefan do not want to grow beyond the 18 hectares but they have already many more offers for more land. So if they need to stop on a location, they can easily start on another location. Later on we will place a more extended article with more ins and outs on their business model and a short movie on this Newbie prize winning farm on the newbie website.