Boer Gerrit
Boer Gerrit (Farmer Gerrit), 75 years old, is about the last farmer in Usselo, the Netherlands,
to do it the old-fashioned way. There used to be 80 around the area, now he is the last one.
He knows exactly why he kept doing it the same way for all those years.
“The others all want to be big, bigger, crazier.” Not him. He has less than twenty cows with his son Erwin.
Seven days a week he starts milking the cows at 6 AM and again around 5 PM in the afternoon. In between, he does other jobs around the farm and keeping everything clean. “I am an old-fashioned farmer,” he says.
Grow, expand, to 200 cows? Never! We've had chickens. At first, it was like this: the farmer received 20 cents per egg and the shop girl 5, now it is the other way around. The shop girl gets 20 and the farmer 5.
If the farmer wants to keep that up, he has to build extra.”
The images below are a look at the everyday life of Gerrit, his son Erwin and his wife Annie.
Unfortunately, this old-fashioned way of farming will die out when these old farmers pass away.
Therefore I felt the responsibility to document this way of life for future generations,
to show how old farming was done.
Photography & retouch | Jeroen Nieuwhuis
Assistants | Ramon Olthof & Ties Olthuis
