Angry farmers on the barricades in The Hague. To understand where this anger of many peasants comes from, the documentary series zooms in on Oene. This year it is exactly 20 years since the first outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the Netherlands. Animal disease struck farms and led, in addition to an economic noose of three billion euros, to the preventive disposal of 270,000 - mostly healthy - animals. A crisis that, to this day, feeds distrust towards the government.

TV Presence NRC

Boer Bert ter Beek remembers foot-and-mouth disease.

It is a beautiful oblongsized booklet, from the time when the world had not yet been digitized: one animal per page, with serial number and space to display the stain pattern. Bert ter Beek, farmer in Oene, leaves to Mina 8 and her generation. A beautiful couple was that. “A powerful kind, nice flat back — to milk a little too thick. This was a beautiful cow. Grand! I just couldn't look over it..”
Ter Beek, an agile beautiful man at age, has not looked at the booklet for twenty years, because with Mina 8 and the others it has ended badly. It is the cattle that were culled in March 2001 due to the traumatizing outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. “The Killing Fields of Oene”, said Ter Beek at the time, but no one thought that was funny.

There does not seem to be a quota on the banning of the television offer. Yvon Jaspers bakes sweet farmers, Tegenlicht and science sections introduce innovative farmers, cooking shows serve tasty farmers and in the Journal angry farmers go to the Binnenhof. On Monday, the Bnnvara docuseries The Peasant Republic highlighted the tragic farmer, as the profession that seems to have happened to everything for decades. Since World War II, the agricultural sector has been chased the path of hyperefficiency, mass production and export. A flight forward - and now the farmers suddenly have to return.

The creators present the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Oene, Gelderse as the moment when the system hit its limits. In the first reports of the infectious disease in the United Kingdom, farmers thought it would not be so fast. Ter Beek was just called to a neighbor to help unload a load of young cattle from Ireland. They had gone around the FMD with a large bow, said the neighbor.

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