Limburg brothers always want to move forward with their dairy farm

Brothers Johan and Willem Loonen recently won the audience award of the Venrayse Ondernemers Prijzen 2025. Not surprising: the brothers' dairy farm breathes innovation, in every way.

© Marloes van 't Klooster

Blieve Loepe. This song by Rowwen Hèze sounded from the speakers of the Venray theater on January 9, at the request of Johan and Willem Loonen. That evening, the dairy farmers were honored to receive the audience award of the Venray Entrepreneur Awards. 'We chose this song not without reason,' says Johan Loonen. 'Our business is always on the move, our heads are full of ideas and we always want to move forward. In other words: Blieve Loepe, keep running.'

The innovative spirit of the Loonen family from the northern Limburg town of Merselo is also evident in the story of the two brothers, who took over the parent company in 2016. At that time there were four hundred dairy cows; now the entrepreneurs milk five hundred animals. 'We deliberately set out to increase scale,' Johan Loonen explains. 'You have to have a certain size to be able to make other kinds of investments. And we are not the kind of people to just milk cows, we want to have more to do.'

Sustainable energy

Partly for this reason, the entrepreneurs invested heavily in renewable energy. 'We think it is important to give something back to the environment, which, as a large company, we ask quite a lot of. In 2018, we installed a mono manure digester, with which we make green gas from our cow manure. This gas we supply to the natural gas grid is enough to heat the village of Merselo.'

In addition, there are 1,500 solar panels on the barn roofs and the brothers have a battery, in which they store solar power. 'We use this electricity in our business processes,' says Willem Loonen. 'We also use the electricity from the solar panels to cool 40,000 liters of water in a buffer tank. We then use the cold water to cool the milk. And the heat released from cooling it back goes to the mono manure digester to heat up the manure, something needed for fermentation.'