Henk Kieft Biography

Henk was born in 1949, the eldest son in a farmer’s family. He graduated from Wageningen Agricultural University in 1974. His main expertise is in rural development, sustainable agriculture, natural resources management, programme evaluations and policy advice. From 1989 he has been consultant with ETC-Netherlands, managing the agricultural unit within ETC and was a member of the management team. He led a study for Dutch Development Cooperation on internalizing the environmental costs of fertilizer use.

One of his many program evaluations concerned the 10-year Dutch chemical fertilizer aid program to Mali. The study paid attention to various side-effects on women’s income and the environment. Henk managed the EU project “Setting up Demonstration Centres for Sustainable Agriculture and Market Study” in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, which resulted in strategy papers for sustainable agriculture in the three countries. These strategies were based on the three pillars of organic, low-input and improved conventional farming.

 From 2000-2006 Henk initiated and promoted the National Rural Development Network in the Netherlands. At the moment he still is a member of the Network Facilitators Team. He focuses on multifunctional land-use and brings rural actors together for integrated approaches to development. In addition Henk advises provincial and municipal governments and administrations on empowerment of rural people and on professionalisation of civil servants in effective public-private cooperation.

In 2000-2003 innovative dairy farmers requested that Henk develop a learning programme for their colleagues, based on farmer experiments. In one province the programme proved to be particularly successful , both among farmers and for the environment. Currently Henk’s colleagues are requested by other provinces in the Netherlands to implement this programme there as well.

 During this work Henk came in contact with some controversial methods.
Farmers were applying so-called ‘energetic’ techniques, either based on broadcasting electro-magnetic frequencies or on developing intuition and love for soil, plants and animals. The farmers requested Henk to make an international survey of those techniques elsewhere to show ‘they were not crazy’. The study resulted in a very interesting overview of various techniques used all over the world, from ultra-modern to very traditional agriculture, marginal indeed but still surviving for centuries in spite of strong pressure to adopt industrial farming methods.