Bram Bombeek quit his desk job to farm Wildebeek, a 30-hectare family farm in Belgium that once raised Belgian Blue cattle. After a 2019 design course, he's now in his first year building direct marketing and planned grazing systems on the land his family has worked for generations.
Questions this video answers
June 19, 2020.
30 hectares.
Fourth generation.
East Flanders, Belgium.
Belgian Blue beef cattle.
Chapters
All right, welcome to a new episode of Farm Like a Hero, folks. I'm Richard Perkins. Today I'm here with Bram Bombique who left his job after he attended a farm scale design course with us here at the farm back in 2019. So this is his first start up year at wildebeek on his 30 hectare fourth generation family farm in East Flanders in Belgium. And they had existing sales there, Belgian blue beef cattle. But Bram started direct marketing, planned grazing as well as crowdsourcing and passed through Boiler Enterprise, but in very early stages. And I think there's a lot of great things to talk about there, about the delicate dance of succession and transitioning from more conventional practices to a brighter, more regenerative future. So super excited to have you on Bram. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
You're welcome.
So let's just go back to that, if you're willing to talk about that. You did a training here that must have had quite an impact on you if you actually you did. So.
I was thinking about it, but it really accelerated things to be there. And certainly the projects we did in the evenings where everybody talked about their projects there really, I wasn't in the beginning, I was like, really? I'm like nowhere and I haven't. There's nothing really that has materialized and I'm just finding things out. But the way everyone was so enthusiastic and they had like, yeah, really big hurdles. They had student debt, they were looking for properties. There were like really big obstacles and I was like, okay, but I can just, you know, I can just start. And that's. I felt privileged when, when I heard other people's stories and yeah, that made me think, why don't I just have a go and start farming in spring? So I left my job in November, really with the idea before Corona and all the crazy stuff that's been happening since really with the idea. I don't want to be on a desk and I don't want to be on phone. I want to go out in spring and start farming. Yeah.
Awesome. Awesome. Well, we seem to sometimes have that effect on people. But it's super nice to hear. But I wonder if you could tell us a bit of the background of the farm. It's been in your family for generations. And tell us a bit about the history of that and where it's at today without the influence you've put in.
Yeah. So my grandfather's father was the first farmer and that was really when everybody in Flanders was still a farmer. You know, really small farms With a few cows. We were in the dairy region of Dairy region of Belgium. And my grandfather really made it into a milking well, a dairy farm with the Belgian Blue, no, the East Flemish old style cattle. And he really built up the infrastructure. He was the. They started milking on pasture with like a cart drawn by dogs and stuff like that. So really primitive. But he was the first to, you know, build decent stables in the village to plant corn and stuff like that. So he was a real farmer who made a living from it. And eventually it passed on to my mother who didn't really want to be in farming. And she, you know, she always tells me I wanted to quit and now. And I was almost there and now you want to start farming. So you really turned my life around. And she wasn't that enthusiastic about it, but she married a veterinarian. And my father was really into animals and genetics and he did artificial insemination and embryo transplants. That was his thing with a colleague of his. And they had like, really good, you know, what's the, you know, for competitions and stuff like that. Really good genetics from the Belgian Blue cattle, you know, the really muscles cattle. So he sold that with embryos and, you know, artificial insemination where he used all the mixed race cows in which then he put really good embryos. So it was his. Yeah, it was quite innovative as well from his background as a veterinarian. So that was something they made good money with. But eventually the rules changed and you couldn't use mixed cows anymore. So he thought, yeah, it's too much work. It will just be, you know, farm producing steers basically for the meats industry in Belgium. The Belgian blue cattle have steers that are at huge weight, that's 24 months. So it's really. It's easy to get rid of them. They pay €750 for a calf. So it's. That's what he was doing. And he's a veterinarian, so he does the caesarean operation himself. So it was something that fit their context. But it's not really, you know, it was phasing out. They were thinking about, you know, quitting. They kept the animals here more because of the emotional side towards my grandparents, towards my mother's parents. They were like, they wouldn't understand if there wasn't any farming anymore. So it was more emotionally than pure economically that they were continuing farming. And so I actually mismented. But I also started the, the direct sales of the beef. So we didn't do it before, but I started it in March.
