Herenboeren / People’s Farms (2015-2020)
The Herenboeren (People’s Farms) objective is to give people and communities control over their own food, through cooperative, shared ownership of the farm (200-250 households per farm, € 2.500 one-time investment and monthly subscriptions to products), the planning, production and consumption. Principles: nature-driven, healthy soil, more biodiversity, a good life for the animals, working towards a closed cycle. Professional farmers are employed with a fixed income. Cooperative members are encouraged to help out on the land.
The founders of the Herenboeren Netherlands foundation started the first Herenboerderij (farm) in 2016 in Boxtel. The foundation orchestrated the framework, business model, infrastructure and tooling to enable communities of households to start their farm. In June 2025 the foundation was declared bankrupt due to long-running investment risks. In Aug 2025, the individual farm cooperatives firmly declared their independence, but also found a new way to collaborate and continue scaling, through the Association of Herenboerderijen. As of September 2025, there are 25 Herenboeren farms, and dozens in the founding stage, with well over 9000 active members in total.
Common Source (Amped at the time) was part of the founding team (and on the board until 2020) and enabled the Herenboeren concept with business development, financial advice, custom-made web applications, playbooks, sales, communication & marketing and we developed the Herenboeren brand.
For the practical participation of the Herenboeren-community, we also developed the HB-platform and produced the video-tutorials for each step in the onboarding process.
