Happy to welcome EU Executive Vice-President Mr. Frans Timmermans to our Carbon Farming Conference!
Within the political atmosphere of Brussels, carbon farming became a hot topic over the last months, since in April EVP Mr. Timmermans announced that the EU Carbon Farming initiative will be launched at the end of 2021.
This fitted perfectly into our Carbon Farming consortium's schedule. We had been writing our white paper for some time, detailing the challenges, lessons learned and recommendations from our project with a focus on national and EU policymakers. Perfect timing to hand over our white paper to EVP Mr. Timmermans and invite him to our Carbon Farming conference in December.
But it's not so easy to get to his attention. When the usual route through us as organizations did not seem to work, we decided to have the request for a meeting go directly through the carbon farmers themselves in a short video. Four farmers from across the North Sea Region spoke about their experiences with carbon farming and together invited EVP Mr. Timmermans for a short meeting to hand over the white paper with policy recommendations to him.
This request from the carbon farmers was very positively received and in November we can hand over the white paper to him in person in Brussels. How delighted we were! In response to this commitment our project leader Marjon Krol wrote an extensive letter to Frans Timmermans in which she pointed out the necessity to stimulate farmers in a positive way to change to carbon farming and she also invited him to our final conference in December where he will give a short speech on the EU Carbon Farming Initiative.
In conclusion, we are very happy with the successful contact we had with EVP Mr. Timmermans up until now. We are to hand him over the white paper in person in November and were lucky to receive a speech on the topic from him during our final conference.
Lesson learned: nothing ventured nothing gained. Hope to see you all during our final conference!