12 reasons to buy local, seasonal food direct from farmers in the Netherlands

Food that grew in living soil, was picked ripe in its own season and reached your kitchen within a few days gives your body more nutrients and less to clear out than food grown for yield and shipped for a week. The way food is grown also shapes the soil, the farmer's income and the money that stays in your region. This guide follows food from the soil to your plate and shows what changes at each step.

by Lucinda Allen · published 15 October 2026 · last edited 2 November 2026 27 references

Moss & Marrow reads the evidence through mechanisms

Nobody has run a ten-year trial comparing a pasture-raised egg from a farm down the road with a supermarket egg, and nobody is likely to. Large nutrition trials are expensive, and the money for them comes mostly from companies with a product to sell afterwards, while a farmer selling eggs at the gate has no budget for a trial and nothing to patent.

So we reason from mechanisms that are well understood. A plant can only take up the minerals its soil holds, an animal's fat reflects what the animal ate, and vitamin C breaks down with time and heat. When the mechanism is clear and the measurements that do exist point the same way, we draw the conclusion and say it plainly. Where a point rests on animal studies, a single paper or our own reasoning, we say that too.

For your health

What reaches your plate depends on the soil it grew in, how the animal lived, how long the food travelled and when it was grown.

1. Plants grown in living soil carry more nutrients

A plant builds itself from sunlight, water and whatever its soil holds. Soil that is rotated, fed with compost and manure and left full of life gives the plant more to draw on, and a plant that is not sprayed carries fewer residues into your kitchen. Michael Pollan put the chain in one line: "We are what we eat eats too."

Vegetables have lost minerals and vitamins since 1950

A comparison of 43 garden crops between 1950 and 1999 found declines of 6 to 38% in protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C (Davis 2004). Part of the loss comes from breeding for higher yields, which produces bigger crops with more starch and water and fewer minerals per bite. The rest comes from soil that is worked harder than it can recover.

Organic crops carry fewer pesticide residues and more polyphenols

A review of 343 studies found pesticide residues on organic crops about four times less often than on conventional crops, along with roughly half the cadmium and 20 to 40% more polyphenols (Barański 2014). When US families switched to an organic diet for six days, the pesticides measured in their urine fell by 60% (Hyland 2019).

Older plant varieties give a wider range of nutrients

Supermarket varieties are bred for yield, shelf life and sweetness, which leaves many crops with similar nutrient profiles and has pushed older varieties out of the shops. Each variety carries its own mix of polyphenols and minerals. Heritage grains such as einkorn and emmer contain more selenium, zinc and magnesium than modern wheat.

2. Animals raised on grass and pasture give more nourishing food

An animal turns what it eats into meat, milk, eggs and fat, so its diet shows up in yours. Cattle on grass, pigs and hens outdoors and animals with room to move produce food with a different fat profile and more fat-soluble vitamins than animals kept indoors on grain and soy.

Liver sits at the top of our nutrient density chart, which scores 244 foods on what the body actually absorbs from them.

3. Local food reaches you fresher, with more of its vitamins intact

Local food spends days instead of weeks between the field and your kitchen. In the Netherlands, local means a farm within cycling or driving distance; most supermarket produce comes through central distribution centres and often from Spain, Morocco or South America. A shorter journey means riper picking, fewer losses in storage and a farmer you can ask.

Vitamins start to break down as soon as food is harvested

Vitamin C and folate fall during transport and storage, and produce in transit oxidises and picks up packaging chemicals, ripening gases and coatings meant to keep it looking fresh. Frozen produce, picked ripe and frozen close to the field, often keeps more of its vitamins than "fresh" produce that has spent a week on the road.

Produce picked for a long journey never ripens on the plant

Fruit reaches its highest vitamin and antioxidant content at peak ripeness, which studies on strawberries and sweet peppers have measured stage by stage (Hwang 2019; Martínez 2005). Produce that has to survive a long journey is picked before that point and often ripened later with ethylene gas.

A short supply chain cuts out most of the packaging

Pre-packed meat and produce come with a foam tray, plastic film and a printed label, and all three can release plasticisers such as BPA and BPS into the food, especially with heat, fat and time. A farm shop, a market stall or a butcher's counter hands you the food with little or no plastic.

4. Seasonal food grows in the conditions it is adapted to

Seasonal food is food grown outdoors in the months it naturally grows. Local and seasonal often overlap, but they are separate choices: a Dutch tomato in January is local but grown in a heated greenhouse under lamps, while a Spanish orange in January is in season but far from local. The best choice is food that is both.

Vegetables grown in season carry more vitamins

Broccoli sold in autumn, its natural season, had nearly double the vitamin C of broccoli sold in spring, and the seasonal difference was larger than the difference between organic and conventional broccoli (Wunderlich 2008). A 2024 study found 157% more vitamin C in broccoli grown in summer and autumn than in winter and spring. Plants grown outdoors in the right season get the light, temperature and time they need to build their full nutrient content.

Eating with the seasons gives you more variety through the year

A supermarket sells the same few vegetables in January and in July, so most people eat the same foods week after week. Eating by season changes what is on your plate every few months: roots and cabbages in winter, greens in spring, fruit in summer, squash and apples in autumn. More variety in plants means a wider range of fibres and polyphenols for your gut bacteria.

Milk and meat change with the grazing season

Cows grazing fresh spring and summer grass give milk with more omega-3 and CLA than cows on winter silage, and summer butter is yellower from the beta carotene in the grass (Elgersma 2015). The best grass-fed meat and dairy follow the grazing year.

Seasonal food may help keep your circadian rhythm in step with the year

Our view is that food carries information about the conditions it grew in, and that eating with the seasons helps keep the body's circadian rhythm, and its slower yearly rhythm, in step with the time of year. Chrononutrition, a young field within chronobiology, studies how food interacts with these body clocks. No study has tested seasonal eating directly, but three lines of evidence point this way, and it matches how people ate for most of human history, when the food on the table was whatever the season brought.

• Plants under stress make signalling compounds. Plants produce more polyphenols in response to strong light, cold and drought, and the xenohormesis hypothesis proposes that animals read these compounds as cues about their environment (Howitz and Sinclair 2008). The hypothesis is plausible and unproven.
• Gut bacteria follow the seasons. The gut bacteria of the Hadza in Tanzania, who eat what each season brings, shift through the year, with some species disappearing and returning (Smits 2017). Other researchers dispute how large the shift is.
• Body clocks respond to food. Light sets the master circadian clock in the brain, and meal timing sets the clocks in the liver and gut. Whether the content of seasonal food adds to that signal has not been studied.

See what's in season in October

at their bestCelery, Apples, Lamb, Red & fallow deer, Mussels, Sloes, Cauliflower, Pears

last chanceSpinach, Garden herbs, Raspberries, Walnuts, Roe deer, Elderberries

coming in JanuaryRoe deer

Turn the wheel to any month to see what Dutch farms and fishers have then, and who near you sells it.

See what's in season →

For the soil, nature and animals

How a farm grows its food decides whether its soil gets richer or poorer, how much room is left for wildlife and how its animals live.

5. Crop rotation keeps soil fertile, and monoculture wears it out

A field that grows a different crop each year, with grass or clover in between, gets back what the last crop took out. A field that grows the same crop every year slowly loses its structure and its life.

Monoculture needs more fertiliser and more pesticide

Growing the same crop on the same field year after year strips the soil of structure and life, so farmers need more fertiliser and more pesticide to keep yields up. Pests and diseases that live on one crop build up when that crop never moves. Artificial fertiliser then replaces only nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and leaves out the trace minerals a plant also needs.

Rotation and manure keep soil alive

A 50-year field trial found healthier soil and more earthworms under rotation than under monoculture (Bogužas 2022). Compost and manure return a much wider mix of minerals and organic matter than artificial fertiliser does, and grass or clover in the rotation feeds the soil life between crops.

6. Organic and mixed farms hold more wildlife and more carbon

A farm without synthetic sprays, with hedges, field margins and animals on grass, leaves room for life beyond the crop.

Organic farms support more species and store more carbon

Organic farms support about 30% more plant and animal species on average than conventional farms (Tuck 2014). They also hold more carbon in their topsoil (Gattinger 2012), although the size of the climate benefit is disputed (Leifeld 2013).

Grazing animals close the loop

Grazing animals return manure to the land they graze, which is how fields were kept fertile before artificial fertiliser. On a mixed farm the animals eat what the land grows and their manure feeds the next crop, so less has to be brought in from elsewhere.

Regenerative and nature-inclusive farms go a step further

Two kinds of farming put the land first. Regenerative farming is soil first: no ploughing, cover crops between harvests and a living soil that improves year on year. Nature-inclusive farming (natuurinclusief) is wildlife first: herb-rich grassland, hedgerows, ponds and room for meadow birds on the farm itself. Neither is a certificate, so the Field Guide lists the practices each farm describes on its own website. On the Field Guide map, open the filters and tick "Regenerative" or "Nature-inclusive" to see only those farms.

7. Pasture changes how the animal lives as well as what it eats

Grass changes the animal's diet, and pasture changes its days: room to move, daylight and the chance to graze and root.

Cows on pasture are healthier

Cows with access to pasture have less lameness, fewer hoof and hock injuries, less mastitis and lower mortality than cows kept indoors (Arnott 2017). Stress in animals raises inflammation and damages the quality of the meat.

Grazing is common in the Netherlands, organic farming is rare

About 80% of Dutch dairy farms graze their cows for at least part of the year (ZuivelNL 2024). Organic farming is far rarer: only 2.2% of cattle and 1.1% of pigs in the Netherlands are raised organically (CBS 2023).

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For farmers and the community

The choices above also decide what kind of farming continues. Money spent at a farm gate goes to farmers who rotate crops, graze animals and look after soil, and keeps them in business.

8. Farmers keep the retail price when you buy direct

Through a supermarket, the farmer receives the wholesale price and processors, transport and the retailer take their share before you pay. For a kilo of Dutch pork the farmer gets about a quarter of the shelf price, for potatoes about a third and for onions about a fifth. Conventional dairy farmers made a loss of about 2% on their milk before subsidies (Wageningen Economic Research 2021).

Direct sales give small farms a margin they can live on. A farmer who knows next month's customers can plan a rotation, keep animals on grass longer and grow varieties a supermarket would not take, instead of growing whatever a supply contract orders.

9. Buying direct helps small farms stay in business

Farming in the Netherlands is concentrating in fewer, larger businesses, and small farms are the ones closing.

In 2024 the Netherlands had 49,900 farms, about half the number of 2000. Small farms fell from 30% to 17% of all farms since 2010, and the largest farms now produce 62% of the value added (Wageningen University & Research 2025).

Small farms that sell direct depend on customers who come back. Every farm that closes takes its fields, its varieties and its know-how out of the region, and the land usually goes to a larger neighbour.

10. Buying direct lets you ask how your food was grown

A label tells you a few things about a product. A farmer can tell you all of them. At the farm you can ask what was sprayed this year, what the animals ate and how the soil is managed. Many good small farms hold no organic certificate because their customers know them personally. That is why the Field Guide checks what each farm does on the land instead of which labels it carries.

11. Local farms make the food supply more resilient

Most supermarket food depends on long chains: seed, fertiliser and feed from abroad, a few central distribution centres and the computer systems that refill the shelves every day. Long chains are efficient while everything works, and fragile when one link breaks. Recent years have shown how quickly that happens. In 2020 the pandemic emptied shelves of flour and pasta, in 2022 the war in Ukraine left Dutch shops short of sunflower oil and sent fertiliser prices soaring, and in October 2026 an IT incident at Albert Heijn's parent company left some of its shelves empty for days.

Food resilience means a region can keep feeding itself when one of those links fails. That takes many farms growing a mix of food for people nearby, on soil that stays fertile, with customers who keep coming back. Droughts, floods and disrupted trade are expected to become more common, so the farms near you may matter more in future than they do today.

12. Cheap food has costs that don't show up on the receipt

Part of the price gap between farm food and supermarket food is cost that cheap food leaves out.

Food's hidden costs run to trillions worldwide

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization puts the hidden costs of the world's food systems at more than 10 trillion dollars a year. About three quarters comes from diet-related disease and about a fifth from damage to the environment, with nitrogen the largest part (FAO 2023).

Dutch farming pollution costs billions a year

In the Netherlands, pollution from farming caused at least €12.7 billion of damage in 2022, a cost carried through health, water and nature instead of paid at the till. Livestock farming caused €8.5 billion of that, more than 90% of it through ammonia, the nitrogen in manure, and methane (PBL 2025). Counting that kind of damage, Dutch supermarket meat would cost a quarter to just over half more (CE Delft 2018).

Prices that include the harm

Charles Eisenstein calls these externalised costs: "costs of production that someone else pays" (Eisenstein 2011). The economist Arthur Pigou made the same argument in 1920, that a price should include the harm a product does to others. If prices included that harm, the food that does the most damage would also cost the most. And some things you can't put a price on. A centimetre of topsoil can take up to a thousand years to form (FAO 2015), so soil that is washed or blown away is gone for every generation after ours. Living soil is priceless.

“Imagine you are the President of the World and receive the following offer from aliens: … ‘$600 trillion for the entire earth. True, we plan to extract all of its resources, destroy the topsoil, poison the oceans …’ Of course you would say no, but collectively today we are essentially saying yes to this offer.”

Putting it into practice

The reasons above only help if they fit your week and your budget. These are good places to start.

Find the way of buying local that suits you

Buying local doesn't have to mean a weekly trip to a farm. There are many ways in, and most people mix a few.

• Join a CSA. A CSA farm sells its harvest in shares before the season starts, and you collect your share each week.
• Harvest your own. Pick-your-own farms, food forests and community gardens let you pick or help grow the food yourself.
• Shop at a farmers' market. Farmers' and organic markets bring several farms to one stall-lined street.
• Use a local organic shop. Many organic shops stock produce from farms in the region and can tell you which.
• Visit the farm. Farm shops, honesty stands and milk taps sell straight from the yard, often with self-service when nobody is around.
• Collect from a pickup point. Some farms bring their orders to a pickup point in town, closer to you than the farm.
• Order online from a farm. Some farms deliver to your door or ship boxes from their webshop.
• Check the label in the supermarket. Loose produce has to show its country of origin. Choosing "Nederland" and what is in season is a start, even in a supermarket.

Make it affordable

Buying direct from a farm often costs more per kilo, and some households cannot pay that. Small farms work at a smaller scale, put more hours into every kilo and keep their animals longer: a grass-fed steer takes longer to finish than one fed on grain.

Eating from farms does not have to mean paying more for everything. A few habits bring the cost down.

• Whole birds and cheaper cuts. A whole chicken costs less per kilo than fillets and gives you stock from the bones. Mince, stewing cuts and organ meat cost less than steak.
• Vegetables at the height of their season, when supply is highest and prices lowest. The In season pages show what is ready each month.
• A box or a share. Vegetable boxes, meat shares and CSA memberships spread the cost over the season.
• One category at a time. Buy eggs or meat direct and the rest elsewhere.

Don't aim for perfection

In our view it's hardly reasonable to do everything "perfectly" as a consumer: perfection is often the enemy of progress. A few things help keep perspective.

• Any whole food beats processed food. A factory-farmed egg still gives you more nutrition than a pastry from a packet, and the choices in this guide build on a diet of whole food from any source.
• Organic does not guarantee clean. Heavy metals in the soil end up in organic crops as well, organic rules still allow some additives in processed foods, and organic milk can be lower in iodine and selenium.
• Frozen and tinned food have their place. Frozen fruit, vegetables and fish are often picked or caught at their best and kept that way, and a tin of fish or beans is better than skipping a meal.
• Fresh food does not have to come from a farm. A supermarket cabbage in season is still a good choice.

Support farms beyond your shopping

What you buy is one way to keep good farms going. Owning land together, joining a farm and voting are three more.

• Join a land cooperative. Land van Ons is a citizens' cooperative that buys farmland and leases it to organic farmers. It has more than 31,000 members and around 400 hectares, and membership costs €30 a year. Aardpeer and BD Grondbeheer also buy land for organic and biodynamic farmers, funded by bonds and gifts.
• Join a farm. A Herenboeren farm is owned by around 250 households, and a CSA farm sells its harvest in shares before the season starts. Both share the farm's risk with the farmer.
• Vote with farming in mind. Provinces set the targets for water quality and nature, water boards decide how to meet them, and both are elected on 17 March 2027. Municipalities decide on land use and local food policy.

Start with one change

You don't have to change everything at once. Explore what's in season this month and try one food you haven't cooked before. Or pick one food you eat every week, such as eggs, milk or vegetables, and find a farm for it on the Field Guide map. Once that is a habit, add the next.

See what's in season this month →

References 27

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2. Barański, M., et al. (2014). Higher antioxidant and lower cadmium concentrations and lower incidence of pesticide residues in organically grown crops: a systematic literature review and meta-analyses. British Journal of Nutrition, 112(5), 794–811. doi.org
3. Bogužas, V., et al. (2022). The effect of monoculture, crop rotation combinations, and continuous bare fallow on soil CO2 emissions, earthworms, and productivity of winter rye after a 50-year period. Plants, 11(3), 431. doi.org
4. CBS (2024). Hoeveel grond is in gebruik door de biologische landbouw? In: Nederland in cijfers 2024. Den Haag: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek. longreads.cbs.nl
5. de Bruyn, S., Warringa, G. & Odegard, I. (2018). De echte prijs van vlees. Delft: CE Delft (publication 18.7N81.009, commissioned by Natuur & Milieu). ce.nl
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Frequently asked questions

Is local food always better than organic food from further away?

Not always. Local and organic are separate choices: a local farm can still spray, and organic food can travel for a week. The best choice is a farm close to you that grows without synthetic pesticides, with or without a certificate. Every farm on the Field Guide map is checked for how it farms, not only for its labels.

Is frozen food less nutritious than fresh?

Not necessarily. Produce that is picked ripe and frozen close to the field often keeps more of its vitamins than "fresh" produce that has spent a week in transport and storage.

Is a Dutch greenhouse tomato in winter local and seasonal?

It is local but not seasonal. A tomato grown in January in a heated greenhouse under lamps misses the light and warmth it grows in naturally. Seasonal food is grown outdoors in the months it naturally grows.

Why does food from the farm cost more?

Small farms work at a smaller scale, put more hours into every kilo and keep their animals longer. Part of the gap is also cost that cheap food leaves out: pollution, lost soil and diet-related disease are paid for by everyone, not at the till.

How do I find farms near me that sell direct?

The Field Guide map lists farms, farm shops and markets that meet our inclusion criteria. Search by postcode and by food, and each listing shows how to buy and when the farm is open.

What is in season in the Netherlands right now?

The In season pages show what Dutch farms and fishers have each month, what is at its best and what is about to finish.