Thank you all for coming here.
We are Harry and Leony Koelen. We live in Paisley with our five kids. We emigrated from Holland in 1991, with backpacks and $2,000. We worked for other people for four years before we bought our own first farm in Brussels. In 1999 we sold that farm and moved to Paisley, where the land was cheaper, and we built our new 2,700-head sow barn. We built the other 2,700-head sow barn in 2003, and accumulated 1,100 acres throughout the years. Right now we employ 16 full-time people and a few part-timers.
As young farmers starting from scratch, we can identify with a lot of the struggles that young farmers face today.
The number one problem is access to capital. You need a lot of capital to start farming. It is pretty hard if you have to do it on your own without any help from family. Even with help from family, it's still often very hard to accomplish. We feel that there is a need for a start-up program for young farmers in the form of a government-approved loan that would come with low or no interest payments and flexible terms.
Applicants would have to submit a business plan, and cashflow projections would have to be approved by a peer review committee. These programs need to be designed so that only starting farmers can access them and there are no loopholes for big corporations to grow larger from them. In our own situation, we found it very frustrating that despite being very well educated in swine, it was extremely hard to get financing and other people around us with equity but no experience in pigs could just get the money and start building sow barns. Today we know that most of those people do not own those pig barns any longer.