Healthy food programme on Dutch city farms

The Dutch City Farm Federation vSKBN is working closely together with JOGG (Healthy Young People, Healthy Future) for a healthy food assortment on city farms.

One of the participating farms is De Elzenhoek Nature Centre and City Farm in the town of Oss, part of a network of members of the European Federation of City Farms (EFCF), a non-profit organisation which promotes the interests of and co-operation between urban farms which provide a valuable educational resource to children and young people.

Talitha Visser, manager of De Eizenhoek and a board member of vSKBN, writes in the EFCF’s latest newsletter: “With visitor numbers of 150,000 per year, (broad public, many children), our city farm is an ideal platform to promote healthy food. Among others, one third of our snack machine now consists of healthy snacks, which are a little cheaper than the less healthy ones. It also helps to place the more healthy products in the vending machine at child height.”

The EFCF was formally established in 1990, following several years of informal partnerships between city farms and their relevant national organisations. The organisation’s membership extends right across Europe and its philosophy includes: ‘City farms are green places in the middle of a busy, fast and urbanised world, and on a city farm children can find a safe place to play and meet other children’.

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