Farmers Defence Force

Background

Farmers Defence Force (FDF) is a radical farming activist group in the Netherlands and Belgium, founded by Dutch pig and fruit farmer Mark van den Oever in May 2019. According to Van den Oever, he started the group in direct response to the occupation of pig breeding facilities in Boxtel, Netherlands by animal rights activists on May 13, 2024.¹

In 2019, FDF opposed the Dutch government’s plans to reduce high nitrogen levels in the Netherlands by reducing livestock numbers and buying out farms, with Van den Oever comparing Dutch farmers’ situation to the deportation of Jews during the Holocaust.²

In June 2023, Farmers Defence Force Belgium was formed with an independent leadership team led by dairy farmer Bart Dickens, supported by the Netherlands branch.³ In February 2024 the group claimed to have 4,500 members.⁴

FDF offers memberships to its association for individual farmers and businesses, for the price of €15 and €150 per year respectively, which includes legal representation, actions and meetings.⁵ Part of the association’s proclaimed strategy is “bringing about a change in and rationalizing the thinking of all citizens in the Netherlands by telling a factual and honest story about agricultural, environmental and animal-related matters”.

The group has organised a number of large-scale farmers protests across the Netherlands since 2019.

In October 2019, FDF organised a farmers’ protest in the Hague involving 2,200 tractors.⁶ Two weeks later, FDF organised another protest in the Hague in which tractors drove over police barricades, with the Dutch military eventually using trucks to block demonstrators from the centre of the city.⁷

In 2020, FDF organised a protest of “several thousand” farmers at the building housing RIVM – the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, which is responsible for tackling nitrogen emissions – during which the military was called in to preventatively protect the building.⁸

In June 2022, a local FDF leader and a group of protesters went to the house of Christianne van der Wal, the minister responsible for implementing the government’s nitrogen policy plans, where they rammed police barricades, emptied a slurry tank near the minister’s house, and kicked in the window of a police car.⁹

FDF Belgium was also involved in farmers’ protests in January and February 2024, which blocked the port of Antwerp and main roads between Belgium and the Netherlands.¹⁰ At one of the February 2024 protests, FDF reportedly compared the Belgian government to Nazis, and set a gallows alight that bore the names of three Flemish government parties.¹¹

FDF organised additional farmers’ protests across the Netherlands in February 2024, during which rubble was piled across multiple roads.¹²

Stance on Climate Change

Farmers Defence Force has opposed measures taken by the Dutch government to combat climate change.

FDF has claimed that livestock farming can be part of the solution to climate change, writing in its 2021 annual review that “to continue feeding a growing world population and combat global warming, cows/cattle and farmers are invaluable: indispensable!”¹³

When the Dutch ministry of Climate and Energy published a report on the Netherlands’ path to net zero greenhouse gas emissions in December 2024,¹⁴ FDF labelled the civil service “a dictatorship” in a press release.¹⁵ The group added that the previous Dutch election had shown that the public wanted new policies with “less limitations on freedom for civilians and entrepreneurs”. The same press release claimed that the policy recommendations to encourage more sustainable practices amounted to “the definition of communism”.

In a tweet from February 2024, FDF spokesperson Sieta van Keimpema dismissed climate warnings as “hysterical disaster and fear-mongering”.¹⁶

A few months earlier, in November 2023, Van Keimpema attacked “unfounded media climate hysteria” as she shared a link to an article that claimed three-quarters of Dutch people are concerned about climate change.¹⁷

Agribusiness links and conflicts

Animal feed company De Heus gave a “substantial” amount, “with at least five numbers”, to the farmers protests organised by FDF, according to a 2021 report from Follow the Money.¹⁸

However, there is evidence of conflict between the FDF and other farming groups and producers in the agricultural sector.

Animal feed producer ForFarmers publicly distanced itself from FDF over the group’s radical protest techniques.¹⁹ FDF also criticised a plan for Dutch agriculture produced by ForFarmers in 2021, which included plans to reduce nitrogen emissions and yield more agricultural land for other uses, and said they were holding ForFarmers to an “ultimatum” to withdraw the plan.²⁰

In 2023, the FDF threatened to pull many members of the Netherland’s largest farming labour union, the LTO, over the fact that the union had been moving towards an agreement on the nitrogen plan with the Dutch ministry for agriculture.²¹

According to reporting from Dutch agricultural news outlet NieuweOogst, Dutch multinational dairy cooperative FrieslandCampina expelled Sieta van Keimpema’s dairy business as a member in 2019, claiming that the operation did not comply with their standards for cleanliness and calf mortality. Van Keimpema alleged that FrieslandCampina had terminated her business due to her role with the FDF, Dutch Dairy Board, and the European Milk Board. However, a judge ruled that FrieslandCampina “did not rush” to terminate van Keimpema’s membership, because it had warned and “suspended” the operation three times between June 2018 and February 2019 before terminating membership.²²

Opposition to Dutch government nitrogen policy

Opposition to the shelved nitrogen policies was one of the FDF’s founding principles.

FDF has said that the Netherlands’ former nitrogen targets should be scrapped because they “would take away all life and all activities from the Netherlands”.²³ According to researchers at Wageningen University, who wrote a report about the effects of the government’s nitrogen reduction policy, the targets were ambitious but achievable.²⁴

In 2019, Sieta van Keimpema argued that the nitrogen policy amounted to “civil war” against Dutch farmers.²⁵

FDF has also criticised a model the Dutch government uses to calculate the country’s nitrogen emissions, saying that it is “deception”.²⁶

Following the Dutch government’s announcement that it would require certain dairy farms to sell their businesses at a guaranteed minimum price, FDF founder Mark van den Oever said: “We will not let this happen. Forced buy-out has to be dismissed.”²⁷

In 2023, when scientists from Wageningen University proposed even stricter nitrogen targets after concluding that Dutch nature reserves were suffering more from nitrogen pollution than previously thought,²⁸ the FDF criticised the research in part by referring to the book De Stikstoffuik, which casts doubt on the Dutch nitrogen policy.²⁹ The book was later dismissed by top nitrogen scientists as putting forward false claims.³⁰

During the 2023 Dutch general elections, the far-right party PVV became the largest party in the Dutch House of Representatives. PVV’s leader, Geert Wilders, said that environmental rules from Brussels would have to be put in “the shredder” because “our farmers and much more important”.³¹ Following the PVV’s victory, the FDF posted on X saying “a new reality” had arrived in which “nitrogen can be directed to the dustbin” and “farmer[s] can farm again”.³²

In Belgium, the group’s leader Bart Dickens spoke at an April 2024 event hosted by MCC Brussels, a think tank backed by Hungarian president Viktor Orban, titled “War on Farming”. Dickens told the audience that Belgian nitrogen policy meant “death” for Belgian farmers, that “all farmers must die” as a result, and that therefore farmers “are at war”.³³

Links to far-right parties

The FDF has associated itself with far-right groups in the Netherlands and across Europe.

DeSmog reported that FDF members spoke at an event titled “War on Farming” in April 2024 consisting of farmers groups and far-right politicians from across Europe, in which speakers referenced planned farmers’ protests ahead of the European election in June 2024.³⁴ The meeting was organised by Mathias Corenius Collegium, a Hungarian think tank backed by far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban and funded by shares from the national Hungarian fossil fuel company.

At the event, FDF spokesperson Sieta van Keimpema accused the EU Commission of “deliberately exterminating its own farmers and its own food production” and vowed that the FDF movement would “take a broom and sweep them away from their Brussels homes, sweep them away from the 6th to the 9th [of June]”.

FDF Keimpema joined the Dutch radical far-right party BVNL in August of 2023 ahead of the November parliamentary elections held that same year.³⁵ The party did not win any seats.³⁶