Patchy Ecologies and Policy Futures: Food Forestry in the Dutch Agricultural Debate

Text: Amanda Rendtorff Jein

Image: Alžbeta Szabová

This is an edited version of an essay that was submitted in May 2025 for the course “Food Forestry: Experiencing the Future of Nature and Agriculture”, in response to the question “What should be the future role of food forestry in the Dutch food system?”

The Netherlands is a land of meticulous order – rectilinear ditches, flat fields, and polders precisely zoned by bureaucratic design. Even nature here often feels regulated, confined to reserves with strict boundaries. Into this landscape creeps a different kind of order: a food forest, lush with intermingled species, blurring the line between farm and wild. This sensory tangle of fruit trees, shrubs, and fungi offers a whisper of change amid the neat rows of monoculture. It invites us to smell humus and blossom where once only crop and chemical prevailed. Food forestry in the Netherlands should be embraced not merely as a novel agricultural technique, but as a catalyst to reframe what is viable, governable, and valuable in land use. Food forestry is a model of deep ecological and social entanglement – a living critique of the dominant industrial logic that demands simplification and control. Where industrial farming has been praised for high outputs at the cost of soil and biodiversity, food forests demonstrate that agriculture need not exist at the expense of nature, dissolving the enduring “dualism” between nature and agriculture. Rather than forcing this unruly abundance into existing bureaucratic boxes, governance itself must evolve. In practical terms, this means reimagining subsidies, zoning, and land valuation to favor regenerative, long-term landscape stewardship over short-term yield metrics. It means listening to the rustle of leaves and the buzz of pollinators as much as to market prices. Food forestry, in short, should act as a catalyst for remaking Dutch policy frameworks to honor complexity, resilience, and the multispecies communities that make our food possible. It is a call to move from the tidy spreadsheet of the present system, where the value of a land is measured not only in euros or tons, but in the continuity of life it nurtures.

A young food forest patch (left) stands in stark contrast to the plowed geometry of a conventional field (right) in the ordered Dutch polder landscape.

In the flat, ordered landscapes of the Netherlands, control is a kind of aesthetic. The fields are neat and the ditches run straight. Industrial agriculture functions like “a machine for converting fossil energy into calories”, a logic dependent on monoculture, external inputs, and the erasure of ecological complexity. This is not only an ecological crisis but also a political one: the state’s commitment to agro-industrial intensification sustains a governance model that simplifies life into units of yield and land into zones of use. Agroecology, on the other hand, thrives on functional biodiversity and place-specific knowledge, like Brazilian cases of perennial, multi-layered designs reversing soil exhaustion while feeding communities. Food forests, Ketelbroek among them, translate that logic northward. During an excursion to Ketelbroek, the oldest food forest in the Netherlands, this distinction came alive. I walked along hedges deliberately planted not for yield, but for wind resistance. I was told that elder and black alder “prepare” the soil – pioneers that do not feed us directly, but make life possible for others. Wouter van Eck, the founder of Ketelbroek, highlighted this system’s foundations: polyculture, perenniality, and ecological mimicry. Unlike industrial farms, food forests evolve in layers – root, shrub, canopy, vine – each layer playing a role in nutrient cycling, microclimate regulation, and biodiversity generation. The difference is not just ecological but temporal. Industrial farms operate on seasons and subsidies; food forests ask for decades. As Wouter noted, “the forest starts slow... and then lives strong forever”. If industrial agriculture embodies the logic of acceleration, food forestry insists on patience.

In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing writes that we must learn to notice the “assemblages” of life that form without centralized control. This way of seeing unravels the anthropocentric fantasy at the core of modern agriculture: that humans act, and nature responds. Food forestry does not see humans as engineers of ecosystems but as participants in multispecies collaborations – what Tsing calls patchy entanglements, where growth, decay, and reproduction unfold unpredictably. The contrast could not be clearer. Industrial agriculture treats soil as a dead medium for chemical and genetic inputs. Farmers are managers. Crops are products. Trees are removed if they shade the yield. Agricultural techniques are never just about efficiency – they express deeper cosmologies about who belongs on land, and how land should be made to behave. The dominance of monoculture reveals a belief in order, hierarchy, and control: land is something to be owned, and made legible to human goals. Those who do not conform, whether weeds or animals, are often erased. Food forestry, by contrast, takes the side of the forest – not in a romantic way, but in a relational one. To plant a food forest is to submit to processes you will not control: fungi that negotiate with roots, insects that pollinate without asking permission, and birds that will take their share before you take yours. This is not just a method, but a worldview. A recognition that land is not a blank canvas for human use, but a shared space of entangled lives. This reframing of agency, away from human mastery toward multispecies negotiation, also reframes governance. If nonhumans are participants, then policies must do more than regulate, they must listen. Multispecies justice requires imagining ourselves as already entangled, already responsible.

This entanglement is not metaphorical. It lives in the soil, where relationships among fungi, roots, and microbes form the basis of life itself. Soil in a food forest is not passive. It breathes. It stores memory. Healthy soils depend on diverse communities of nematodes, bacteria, and fungi. Mycorrhizal networks facilitate communication between trees, share nutrients, and shape the microbiome of an entire ecosystem. These are not optional extras. They are the foundation upon which food forestry builds its abundance. In the Ketelbroek forest, this was not metaphor: leaves fell and stayed where they landed, feeding the fungal threads below. The soil was damp, soft, alive. This underground life is mirrored above. Food forestry embeds itself into the local microclimate, planting windbreaks, preserving moisture, welcoming pollinators. The forest becomes not a design imposed on land, but an emergent form grown with it. These ecological relations resist standard agricultural models. There is no single “crop”, no linear planting calendar, no standardization. Labor too is reframed. Food forestry, as seen in the Ketelbroek model, is not labor-intensive in the conventional sense. After its establishment, the system becomes semi-autonomous. But its social logic is cooperative rather than commodified. It grows networks of people as much as plants. The food foresters told us this directly: “We’re not trying to own more land, we’re trying to connect”. In this sense, food forests are not just embedded in ecological surroundings, they are emergent from them. They grow from soil, sun, and sharing alike.

What might policy look like if it were shaped by food forestry, rather than the other way around? Some suggest the idea of performative politics, governance that does not assume fixed categories, but instead acts experimentally making space for “other worlds” to emerge through practice. A food forest is precisely such a world: it performs an economy of care, an ecology of patience, and a politics of coexistence. This means treating governance as a living system; dynamic, adaptive, and relational. Legal forms do not only constrain, but also express values. What values, then, are expressed when we require a food forest to conform to outdated definitions of land use? What alternatives could we imagine if we allowed ecological systems to teach us how to govern? Inspired by fungal networks and pollination pathways, we might imagine a regulatory system that operates less like a pipeline and more like a mycorrhizal web; decentralized, symbiotic, and sensitive to local conditions. Instead of asking “is this allowed here?”, it might ask, “what relationships are possible here?”. This shift would not only benefit food forestry, but offer a broader model for land governance in the Anthropocene: one that sees humans as partners in a larger choreography of life. Such a vision is not naïve. It is pragmatic in the deepest sense. It begins not with abstraction, but with attention. Attention to the needs of fungi, the timing of trees, the rhythms of community engagement. Attention, too, to the ways that laws, budgets, and institutional cultures can support or suffocate emergent life. In this view, policy becomes more than a set of rules. It becomes a practice of cohabitation.

In the end, food forestry’s greatest promise for the Dutch food system is not just the fruits or nuts it produces – food forestry invites policymakers to see agriculture as part of a multispecies entanglement rather than a factory line. It demonstrates that our food system can be managed not by dominating nature, but by cooperating with it. In fresh language: food forestry should take root as a keystone of Dutch food policy and planning, sparking an evolution toward governance that learns from ecosystems. This means embedding long-term ecological thinking into policy – treating soil, water, forests, and communities as stakeholders – and opening up decision-making to those on the ground who tend these living landscapes. Just as a forest garden balances the needs of apples, mushrooms, and bees, so too can Dutch food governance balance the needs of farmers, citizens, and more-than-human life. Such an integration signals a shift from business-as-usual to a more inclusive paradigm. There are, of course, formidable challenges ahead: entrenched regulations, market pressures, and institutional inertia will not disappear overnight. Yet, the very existence of thriving Dutch food forests and the urgency of climate and biodiversity crises make change both necessary and possible. In a hopeful twist, the edges of the Dutch food system are already sprouting with innovation, much as green shoots emerge through fallen leaves. Ultimately, food forestry should be the catalyst for a governance metamorphosis – one that honors entangled ecologies and fosters a participatory, resilient food future. As we step back from the forest, we carry its lesson that policy, like a mycorrhizal network, can adapt to nurture each unique community and ecosystem it touches. In that enduring lesson lies a seed of hope: a future Dutch food system rooted in collaboration between people and the land.

Reading Recommendations:

Rosine Keltz (2023)

“Dualism.”

Mark D. Hathaway (2016)

“Agroecology and Permaculture: Addressing Key Ecological Problems by Combining Traditional Knowledge and Modern Science.”

John Grin (2025)

“Governance and Politics in the Anthropocene.”

Altieri, Miguel A., and Victor Manuel Toledo (2011)

“The Agroecological Revolution in Latin America: Rescuing Nature, Ensuring Food Sovereignty and Empowering Peasants.”

A.L. Tsing (2015)

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins

Michael R. Dove (2021)

“Culture, Agriculture, and the Politics of Rice in Java.”

Kyle Powys Whyte (2018)

“Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fanta- sies of Climate Change Crises.”

Du Preez, Christel C., John W. Doran, and Francois J. Calitzn (2022)

“Nematode-Based Indices in Soil Ecology: A Global Synthesis.”

Suzanne W. Simard (2018)

“Mycorrhizal Networks Facilitate Tree Communication, Learning, and Memory.”

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2008)“Diverse Economies: Performative Practices

for Other Worlds.”