Georgica

After the Second World War, Dutch farmer and politician Sicco Mansholt was a cabinet minister and European Commissioner for Agriculture. This strong advocate of large-scale farming regretted this policy in later years. On his deathbed he is reported to have read Virgil’s classic didactic poem (), which celebrates Roman agriculture, forestry, viticulture, cattle farming and apiculture, drawing lessons from it about the relationship between humanity and nature. Virgil’s work forms the departure point for the eponymous film, which reflects on the accomplishments of large-scale agriculture on the Flevo polder in the Netherlands. We watch arable farmers, livestock farmers, beekeepers and fruit farmers at work, reading aloud passages from the poem and talking about the extent to which they can relate to it. The camera glides over the polder’s well-ordered fields and straight roads, sometimes to the accompaniment of slow acoustic chords, or a narrator’s voice sketching in some background information. Twice we hear the warning voice of Mansholt, and an elderly woman, a former farmer, shares recollections of him. A wide spectrum of farms passes the revue: from the large to the small scale, from a robot-operated goat dairy to a care farm. This array of modern farms affords us insight into the past and the future, and into the influence of government and the food industry.