This farmer has tens of thousands of kilos of green beans left over: you can come and pick them up for free
Imagine this happening to you as a farmer. You have a gigantic field full of perfectly grown vegetables, but not a single factory wants them. What do you do? Arable farmer Reindert Kuiper found himself in this situation and immediately came up with a solution: anyone who wants to can come and pick up his green beans for free.
We all got pretty grumpy because of this year’s rainy spring. But Reindert Kuiper became even sadder. He grows green beans that are later frozen. Around 15 to 20 percent of his beans became moldy due to the heavy rainfall over the past few months. The result: the canning factory – where Kuiper normally always delivers his green beans – does not want to take the beans from him. And there you are, with no fewer than 40,000 kilos of beans.
In a pickle
The canning factory has a strict rule: if more than 9% of them are ‘bad’, they will not take any. So Kuiper is over that limit this year. The bitter irony is that there is actually nothing wrong with all those green beans. They are healthy and tasty and therefore perfectly fine to eat. But the factory does not want them, so no machine will come to harvest the beans either. What do you do then? Picking them yourself takes far too much work. Hiring temporary workers is too expensive. Ploughing everything under, then? That would be truly wasteful, especially in the context of food waste. When you consider that we waste 2 billion kilos of food in the Netherlands – for comparison: that’s a traffic jam stretching from Utrecht to Barcelona, made up of trucks full of food waste! – you quickly rule out that option. So there is only one possibility left: anyone who wants to can come and pick up the green beans for free.
Win-win
On Saturday, September 2, tomorrow, everyone is welcome to come to Kuiper’s field. Be sure to put on your rubber boots and bring a crate, because you will be picking the beans yourself. A tasty and rewarding chore. Who knows, you might pick enough green beans to last the rest of the year. And believe us, you can do a lot with them. You can deliciously roast them, use them in a quiche or cook them for a delicious classic Dutch avg meal. I see a win-win situation here. You get lots of delicious green beans, and farmer Kuiper gets rid of his harvest.
Would you like to pick beans at the farm? You are welcome on Saturday, September 2, between 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. at his land in Hensbroek, North Holland. Kuiper recommends navigating to ‘De Fuik’; you will get there automatically.
Also read:
- This farmer’s tip will keep your strawberries fresh for super long
- Don’t be a jerk at the farmers’ market
- Recipe: bean salad with crayfish and baby potatoes
Source: RTL Nieuws
