Chicago Tribune:
Jose Van Wezel grew up on a dairy farm in the Netherlands that was started by her grandfather. Her husband, Jeroen, was raised on a dairy farm nearby.The over regulated EU creates no joy among the producing class.
Shortly after they married, they moved into a quaint farmhouse and took over Jose's family's farm, a 74-acre plot beside a forest with 50 cows. But instead of following the well-trod path of their ancestors, the Van Wezels sold everything in 2000 and immigrated with their two children to the barren, flat prairies of northwest Ohio.
"We came to a point where if we wanted to go further in the dairy business, we needed to expand," said Jose Van Wezel, 36, who now owns 675 cows and plans to increase the herd to 1,540. "If you look at the Netherlands, there are 16 million people, and they're all in the area three times as small as Ohio. You can imagine that there is more pressure on ground prices than here."
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At a time when many dairy farms in the U.S. are going out of business, a wave of Dutch farmers is selling property in the Netherlands and using the money to set up much larger dairy operations abroad. The exodus has been prompted, in part, by exorbitant land prices in the Netherlands and a strict quota on milk production, making expansion difficult if not impossible for many farmers.
After selling their farms in the Netherlands, the Dutch have used their earnings to buy farms in such far-flung places as South Africa, Brazil and Eastern Europe. In the United States, Dutch farmers have recently opened dairies in Iowa, New Mexico and South Dakota, where state officials have hired a consultant to tout the charms of their state to prospective Dutch transplants.
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Dutch farmers have been moving abroad for decades, primarily because of the scarcity of available farmland in the Netherlands. In recent years, the exodus has accelerated because of the sky-high land prices as well as increased competition among members of the European Union (news - web sites). There also is concern that the system of milk quotas, which limits the amount of milk that can be produced, would be eliminated.
As it now stands, Dutch dairy farmers can sell their milk quota, worth roughly $25,000 per cow. Farmland in the Netherlands costs between $10,000 and $20,000 an acre compared with $3,000 to $5,000 per acre in northwest Ohio.
"There, life is made more and more difficult," said Joop Bollen, a Dutch native who now heads South Dakota's efforts to recruit foreign dairy farmers. "Land is more and more expensive, milk quotas are more expensive, regulations are more and more stringent. They feel they are being squeezed out of their profession."
Bollen said the weakness of the dollar in recent years has made the U.S. even more attractive for Dutch farmers as their money can buy so much more once they arrive. In the five or so years since he started luring foreign farmers to South Dakota, Bollen said 18 Dutch farmers have moved to the state, as well as several Irish and British farmers.
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