Mansholt

In the years after the war, the Netherlands’ agriculture minister Sicco Mansholt piloted large-scale mechanised farming.

Mansholt wanted to secure the country’s food supply by increasing production.

Heavy machinery, chemical fertilisers, and new research and technology were part of a modernising mission that Mansholt later evangelised across the continent as the first European commissioner for agriculture through the common agricultural policy.

Mansholt saw the union’s role as preventing any recurrence of famine, such as the terrible “Hunger Winter” suffered by the Netherlands in 1944 and 1945.

Sicco Mansholt was a Dutch farmer who became the E.U.’s first commissioner for agriculture, in 1958.