Arend Jan Kleinhout

My life

After the early years in tropical Surinam, schooling in the NL, a year at sea pendling between Rotterdam and New York as ships engineer and a stay in New Guinea during the final conflict with Indonesia in the Cryptic Service of the Royal Dutch Navy, I embarked on a career in Agriculture.

Following a training in Trop. Agriculture designed for leading jobs on plantations  at ever swindling opportunities,  I moved on to  McGill University, Montreal, to graduate with a B.Sc and M.Sc and Plant breeding as speciality. 

I then joined KWS Saat, D, as a plant breeder of F1-hybrids in cereals in an international effort, found and married my life-long partner Sabine to leave, after a short stay in DK, with our first son for NL. to join Barenbrug, as breeder of grasses, beet and field beans. It is in those years my life-long passion for a modernization of the beet crop in storage and handling started with the organization of the first on-farm demonstrations and the production of the first film to that effect.

With meanwhile 3 children to care for, we then embarked for a new adventure by moving to DK to join DLF Seeds as Head R&D, with grasses, clovers, beet, oil-seed rape and peas as the main programs and a 4th child to care for. Beet assumed a decisive part of our income and It is in this context we were the first company world-wide to develop a Round-up tolerant Fodder Beet variety and to engage in an international effort to modernize the storage and handling of this crop. 

Since then I run my consultancy mainly on the handling and storage of the beet crop as well as the administration,the development of implementation projects and marketing of the Technology embedded in the pursued patent as the main efforts.

A life-long vision and commitment towards  a green future.

Since my early days in plant breeding the development of disease resistance has been a major brick towards  a green agriculture in a never ending fight with plant pathogens. Grasses, clovers and beet, however, are green crops, indeed, whether it comes to the use of pesticides or leaching of nitrate into the ground water.  History has also shown that our efforts in Round-up resistance in beet, which were put on ice, lived up to a major on-farm reduction of fossil oil and use of other far more potent herbicides in the USA.

Since my early years at Barenbrug I have recognized the enormous yield potential/ha at a world-wide adaptation and superb feeding quality of the beet crop. However, on account of a problematic storage and the daily work involved in feeding, the crop rapidly lost terræn in the battle for market shares. On that account I started with silage trials to modernize the crop in storage and handling leading to positiv results and on-farm implementation of maize-beet silage in NL.  

With a major market-share of fodder beet in Europe as the driver at DLF Seeds I coordinated an international effort to advance the concept of silage, particularly that of beet-straw silage, involving industrial partners for the development of hard-ware to that effect. The progress hereto has been published in: A. Kleinhout, 1990, in Milk and Meat from Forage Crops, BGS Occasional symposium No.24, pp.157-172, McCorquodale Print, Ltd., Stratford Road, Wolverton, GB. With no EU ha-support for the growth of Fodder Beet and succesful demonstrations in DK, D and the UK to show for, our efforts finaly stranded.

First in my years as consultant of KWS Saat in 2010 combined with a massive engagement of the company to that effect the efficiency of the storage of the crop at maximum logistics and minimum handling has been realized with an increase in acreage for biogas production as success criterion. 

The Patented Technology has taken it from there with a zero fermentation of the sugars and protein-complex as the final step in this process.