“I started at Warmonderhof with the idea: this is the start of my connection to the beginning of everything. Because everything starts with agriculture right? And I want to be part of that.”

“Everything we do starts with agriculture”

Pelle de Roos (20) is a third-year student at the time of this interview and has chosen to major in fruit farming.
“Because in the six months before I was able to start at Warmonderhof, I worked on a biodynamic dairy farm, I thought animal husbandry was the subject that suited me best. But as soon as I entered the fruit garden here, I knew: this is it. In arable farming and horticulture you start afresh with new plants every year. In fruit growing, you’re really building something. You look after the trees and they give you their fruit in return. At the beginning of May, the trees were blossoming so beautifully. It’s so wonderful here then. A magnificent bit of paradise in the polder. I’m doing my entire third-year internship at the Twisk Organic fruit garden, one of Warmonderhof’s permanent internship partner locations.

Discovering yourself at Warmonderhof

“Many of the adults around me have studied at Warmonderhof. When I was little, we went on holiday on farms owned by former ‘Warmonderhoffers’ and we lived on a biodynamic dairy farm for a while. So I heard about Warmonderhof from an early age. It was the place where they had discovered themselves. That’s how they talked about it. Even as a child I occasionally visited Warmonderhof, because my babysitter was at school there. But I thought: I don’t want to become a farmer. It didn’t seem so creative to me, and I was always into theatre and the arts. I still write a lot of poetry.

“Messing around with Excel”

“After VMBO (pre-vocational secondary education) I went on to do HAVO (senior general secondary education), and when I thought about my future, every month I found a new field really interesting. Until my grandmother said: ‘Why don’t you go to Warmonderhof?’ I’d never thought about that, that I could do that too. At first I just went there because of the great stories I’d heard about living, working and learning, not necessarily to go into agriculture. But I really enjoy all the subjects we get here at Warmonderhof. I love maths. And here I’m allowed to do lots of calculations and mess around with Excel, for example by creating a mineral balance, calculating the organic matter content in the soil, and keeping track of the farm’s costs and expenses.

“My world view turned upside down”

“And I love biology. For a long time, I wanted to study that too. But I also get that here. And being outside; I’m an outdoor kid, I used to play in the woods all the time. At Warmonderhof, you spend half the day working outside. And what’s extra special: I get the opportunity here to create art. Because that’s just another subject here at school. I think anthroposophy and working with attention are key elements of the school. A lot of it is about anthroposophy here, which is unique. I’m glad I get to learn like that. Certain lessons really turned my world view upside down; then I really had to re-discover what I thought about it. We’re given such a new and different view of the world, and of agriculture.

Connecting poetry and agriculture

“After I leave Warmonderhof, I hope to be able to connect that ‘whole earthliness’ of agriculture with the heavenliness of poetry and the arts. What that looks like in practice, I don’t know yet. I don’t have such definite plans, but I do carry around with me the idyllic image of a self-harvesting garden with a stage for poetry, where people have the opportunity to gather in the garden and be in the open air.”