Marrit Kyung Ok Schakel, farmer and cheesemaker, Hoogmade (Netherlands)
In the Western world, from where we write, agriculture is not only mostly a male industry but also a predominantly white one. As Karen Washington explained to us in the March edition of this magazine, it is simply a lot less evident for non-whites to inherit the parental farm or lands. No lands to start with means lesser chances to succeed at all in a profession that is known for its heavy investments and debts. Marrit Kyung Ok Schakel, who grew up in the Netherlands, is very aware of this. As a Korean Dutch woman running a cheesery on her husband’s farm, she’s used to being seen as other and advocates for more diversity in agriculture.
Marrit Kyung Ok Schakel is a sixth generation organic farmer and cheesemaker on a mission. On the farm she runs with her husband Bas van Rijn, Boerderij Buitenverwachting (the “Out of the Ordinary Farm”, red.), Marrit’s mission in this world is to combine cultural diversity, animal welfare, social equality and craftmanship. Running the farm alongside her husband, the couple is transforming the place into a multifunctional organic enterprise with multiple sources of income such as a food forest, a cheese factory, a farm shop and a polyculture of grasses, clover and herbs. In an industry where the majority of farms are run by white farmers and monocultures or uniform animal species, Marrit stands out. Her goal is to create a successful model for small-scale and artisanal dairy with the use of heritage breeds.
“I never aspired an career in agriculture”, Marrit says. “That would have been the last thing I would have imagined whilst growing up in a village with three hundred inhabitants in a North-West rural area of the Netherlands”. Marrit’s high energy, which is communicative as we interact with her, and stubbornness seemed to predestine her for a career in sports. “I was an active and stubborn girl and quite the athletic type. Speedskating, a native ball game called kaatsen, sailing and artistic gymnastics suited my energy level perfectly.”
As she grew up, Marrit poured her energy into studies. “I have a degree in PA, Communication Management, Democracy and Sports Hospitality and Social Anthropology. It’s the same approach I took as I launched myself in this farming adventure: I am eagerly trying to keep up with knowledge through cheese internships whenever I can and will probably remain a lifelong learner. To me, farming is really an empirical experiment.”
Out of the Ordinary farming
Her career in agriculture started with a chance meeting: by pure coincidence, she met who would become her husband in the city centre of Amsterdam. That man turned out to be a farmer in Hoogmade, a rural area between Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Always curious for new challenges, Marrit took the plunge, never losing sight of the values that mattered to her and instead integrating them into her new career. “Action research, an interdisciplinary approach to life and work, is a crucial part of how I understand the world. That’s why I am very keen to let outsiders judge my farm in a way that is constructive and safe for both parties. I want to know how we are perceived by others and how I can make them feel part of our farming practices. To us, it is very important to understand what our farm’s place is in society and what we can do, as farmers, to stay connected to the people around us.”
At Buitenverwachting, a lot of work is put into renaturing the farm. “Biodiversity is important in order to stay resilient”, Marrit explains. “We have a mini food forest, place hedges for feed and to keep our animals in the plots, place those even in the middle of our lands for vitality, water retention and biodiversity. A lot of our plots are left available for meadow birds. We test the water quality and CO2 credits constantly and engage in small social projects, allowing social initiatives to use the land for events.”
More with less milk
Marrit emphasizes the importance of diversity in her farming practices, both in crops and animal species, to promote health and resilience and to prevent depletion of the soil, water and landscape. Having grown up as a Korean in Friesland, in the north of the country, she is one of the few non-white female farmers in the regenerative farming community. Therefore, Marrit sometimes feels like she’s not being taken seriously. She sees farming as a privilege with important responsibilities and with her thirty-two hectares she wants to be an example for alternative forms of agriculture. In this way she wants to create a different landscape and a better life for her animals.
“I don’t’ believe in daily milk consumption and want quality over quantity”, she says. “To me, this includes white mold cheeses and cow-specific yogurt.” In addition to sustainable farming, Marrit also focuses on community involvement. She sees her farm as a place for the community and is connected to initiatives such as MOMA’s Grondverbond, an initiative that helps people find their way to local farms.
Marrit contributes to a short chain through the MOMA collective by connecting dairy farmers around Amsterdam with the city. In her quest for change, Marrit emphasizes the importance of social regeneration alongside ecological regeneration in the agricultural movement. She promotes diversity of people and cultures on her farm and believes that this leads to innovative products and better quality. As such, Marrit is a pioneer in the transition to a more sustainable, diverse and inclusive agricultural industry.
Milk as a symbiotic experience
Marrit’s speciality on the farm is making products with the farm’s milk. To her, milk is the result of a symbiotic experience starting with the soil and culminating into the finished products. An important parallel for her is the vast diversity she sees in raw milk, a diversity that sometimes scares people. “ Milk is inspiration – this white liquid emerges from the grass and soil which influence it. Raw milk cheese means diversity to me”, she clarifies. “When you make cheese, you introduce new cultures into the process – the more diversity, the more interesting the taste. We are a little afraid of the bacteria in cheese and dairy and often prefer to pasteurize it. The problem is that we remove all the bacteria that makes the dairy special. Like in the real world, we need a little bit of the good and the bad to make it interesting. As long as there are more of the good than the bad and you create an environment where they all can feel safe. Cheese is fun, because it is a transformation of milk that can only happen through diversity.”
“Cheese is an inclusive medium through which I can tell the story of biodiversity and culture well. The cool thing about it is that it is multidimensional because I can also show it, feel it, smell it and experience it.”
It all started with yoghurt
Behind every product Marrit makes, there is a story. “I produce a cow’s milk yoghurt and with that product specifically, I wanted to articulate the taste and quality of milk and especially take the cow out of anonymity. With the birth of our cow Camembert, I provided support to local small cheese farmers from Normandy who seemed to lose the battle with the big cheese factories. With our calf Penicillium Camemberti (White Mold, red.), I wanted to start a conversation about patience and belief in the power of diversity in milk and the presence of raw and lively cultures in your food. Nowadays we are so afraid of something we don’t know and assume that bacteria and molds are bad, but they provide bizarrely delicious flavours and through fermentation processes you get masterful products with contemporary unique characters.”
The idea to start making farm cheeses and yoghurt started with the realisation that the milk alone was not going to provide a sufficient income for a small scale farm. “We had people to feed, so we started by renting out space for recreation and tourism”, Marrit says. “We love yoghurt and cheese and wanted to recreate our favourite yoghurt. That’s how it all started.”
In 2017, Boerderij Buitenverwachting won an award for their pot ripened cow’s milk yoghurt. “It boosted our confidence, and that’s when we said ‘let’s make cheese as well’.” Marrit and her husband schooled themselves with a renowned and award winning raw milk cheesemaker and neighbouring cheesemakers. “I learned soft cheese making from a female award-winning artisan.” Goats milk transforms differently from the more traditional cow’s milk used in the Netherlands for cheeses. “I had to be very empirical in my process to make my cheeses.”
Today, Marrit makes raw milk cheeses with natural rind, soft cheeses and sticky knife cheeses as well as fermenting workshops with vegetables and dairy, blending her Korean heritage with her work as a farmer. “Cheese and kimchi are limiteless”, she explains. “They are made everywhere these days. To me, they represent resilience and the merging of new flavours.”
The next plan for the farm is to reintroduce a CSA-model of vegetable production and an honesty farm shop.
“We are starting to getting noticed by renown restaurants that value local artisan cheeses. That is the where I want my products to be on the plates. We also sell them directly from the farm shop. In the near future we are going to offer a new special tasting experience on the farm.”
A woman of many specialties
Following her growing reputation as a cheesemaker, Marrit became a soft cheese and dairy inspector for national competitions. “I would also like to do national hard cheese taste and quality testing but so far it is really difficult as a young woman to get a spot in the rather narrowminded world of cheese. Although I am hopeful and I consider it not as if, but as a question of when will I participate in the next couple of years.”
Rather by accident, she ran her first table conversation at the annual organic market and sales fair, hosting a talk about entrepreneurship with heritage breeds. “This inspired me to do more and a couple years later I did some course about moderation conversations so now I am available for talks, hosting and programming events.”
“I always look for the spark in farmers, something that makes them tick”, she says. “I love to find those things that matter and give them energy. Shining a light on the people that are not always seen is amazing and worth while. When you are always considered less, even with many ideas and great craftmanship, it drags you down. So why don’t you look closer and be really interested in the other. Check if you assumptions make sense according to the other party, acknowledge them, really see them. Go for longer and stable relationships and really value reciprocity, don’t always expect something back but instead try to be supportive because it is the right thing to do.”
Otherness
Being a woman on the farm as well as different-looking from most farmers we see in northern Europe, Marrit is used to being looked at as the ‘other’. “I get stares, heads turning when I enter a room, things like that. For all kinds of reasons. It’s the stereotype of the white old male farmer running the farm, either based on city people not meeting many real life farmers or locals not being used to see a woman – much less an Asian-looking woman – being in charge. I can explain everything about our farm to visitors, and yet they will ask me who runs the farm.”
“We need to acknowledge there are differences and that when you are in a comfortable position, you need to experience the uncomfortable as well to learn and grow. It will enrich your life and support the other person in their being. If you don’t know about white privilege, then educate yourself and be patient and curious. What is out there in the world that looks and sounds different from yourself and how can you work together and learn and embrace the differences. It is such a joy to realise that there are more perspectives than your own. Diversity is a good thing and we need to embrace it.”
“The difference in questions I get as Asian-Dutch woman is astonishing. While my husband gets substantive questions about farming practises I get condescending questions such as ‘so what do you do a the farm?’ I remember getting ‘are you a dairy farmer as well’ about ten times at our yearly dairy cooperation meeting. I had asked a couple very specific questions about statistics and was flabbergasted. Had these people not been paying attention? It was obvious I’m a dairy farmer by the questions I asked. It was like you can have no knowledge of the business or any skills if you are not a man.”
Marrit pleads to be open-minded and embrace differences. “Make the ordinary special and the special ordinary. Our shop customers have many different backgrounds, eating habits and traditions and yet all I see are videos of white farmers making cheese. There’s a huge shortage of young farmers in our current food landscape and so there are many opportunities for new entries in agriculture. I believe that my own and the next generation will have more room for new dreams in the agricultural sector, with new influences and habits. There are not enough young farmers of colour who get the platform to make themselves heard, so that more young people from different layers of society can also identify with agriculture or be inspired for a career in the agri-sector. It would be good to see those profiles highlighted, those voices empowered, so that young people can see that they are represented and have examples to follow.”
“If someone antagonizes you, whether it is online or in reality, try to find out what you have in common. Then look for the differences from the perspective of trying to understand what they believe, their perspective. I know it’s hard, but it is also worth the effort. Because don’t you want to be understood? Don’t you need that same compassion and kindness when you feel misunderstood? What did you need from the other in that situation? Think about that and see what it does to how you respond to seemingly negative reactions next time you encounter them.”
“Don’t waste your energy on something you cannot change but do try to fight for common goals. What can you do yourself? That’s where you start of. Is it easy? Of course not! It is a never ending story. There is so much to learn and there is so much going on at farms and in the food system.
Don’t give up
When we ask Marrit what she would say to young people looking to start a career in agriculture, she says this: “don’t give up! Do the thousands and thousands of mini steps, they will add up and multiply. Look for bystanders that also understand your needs and can cheer you on! Go for it, you will get there eventually!”
“I’d love to challenge you to celebrate the milestones and preferably some silly or seemingly small things. Having a new door at the stable, let’s do a house warming party with friends, family and or customers. Next year we are certified organic for twenty-five years, an amazing achievement and something to cherish. We are definitely going to celebrate.”
About Marrit
Marrit Kyung Ok Schakel is a farmer, cheesemaker and inclusion activist who runs the organic farm Buitenverwachting along with her husband. Well-traveled, Marrit went to Uganda to film about gender and equality in STEM, studied at the South Korea university and did research on the informal market of local fishermen and foodtrucks on Bonaire.
Always curious, Marrit asks many questions and is a passionate about farming. She loves food and fermenting practises.
Biodiversity on and around her farm does not stop at the animals, plants and soil, but also plays a larger role for Marrit. To her, she is also part of the biodiversity at Buitenverwachting. Even to microbes that live on the hand of the maker. She takes her inspiration for farming and life in the Korean expression of Son-Mat, the taste of the maker (mother) and the hand, containing microbes, as a flavouring agent, giving each dish subtly different tastes according to who made it.
You can follow her via Instagram
This article was published in Women in Ag Mag 2024-004. Click here to read the magazine
