LEUVEN, Belgium — The EU does not spend much time thinking about farmers like Tom Troonbeeckx.

But as Brussels prepares to propose a reform of its landmark €58 billion-per-year Common Agricultural Policy in 2018, the softspoken Flemish farmer offers an alternative model to Europe's conventional wisdom over the last half century.

Troonbeeckx runs 30 hectares of farmland near the Belgian city of Leuven, only 20 kilometers east of Brussels, without wasting any of his time filling in forms to apply for CAP subsidies. Despite this lack of EU support, he says he can still pay three farmers, including himself, a gross annual salary of €36,000, more than twice the European average for agricultural workers.

Troonbeeckx started out by renting a cherry orchard on half an acre of land 11 years ago. It took years of soul-searching, long hours, back-breaking labor and arduous legal battles, but he's now the proud owner of Het Open Veld ("the open field" in Dutch), on which he grows 70 vegetable varieties, grazes 24 cows, sells wild flowers and has nascent plans to start producing cereal crops and cheese.

“Since I’m not into international markets or the multinational economic system, I can create my own economy” — Tom Troonbeeckx, farmer

The business model is unusually communal. The field is "open" in the sense that he sells his produce to 320 people in the immediate neighborhood, who each pay between €220 and €320 per year, depending on their income, for the right to come and harvest food on his land.

“The important thing is that everyone can join and the strongest can bear the heaviest weight,” Troonbeeckx said, recounting that part of the motivation behind his socially supportive model came from seeing his mother left far worse off after his parents divorced.

“Since I’m not into international markets or the multinational economic system, I can create my own economy,” he said, looking out over a field of pumpkins and winter salad leaves.

Cabbages for the community

Troonbeeckx's model is called community-supported agriculture (CSA) and, in many respects, it appeals to the EU's cardinal objectives: supporting smaller, often weak, rural communities and a more eco-friendly model. In just six years, 45 such schemes have popped up across the Belgian region of Flanders.

Although Brussels repeatedly stresses the CAP's goals should be biodiversity and strong rural communities, it's still the large-scale farmers who win big in the CAP. Eighty percent of direct payments go to only 20 percent of farms.

While it is technically possible to support farms like Troonbeeckx's within the CAP, there is no example of this ever having happened, according to the European Commission.

There are numerous reasons for the lack of funding: many young farmers looking to set up small-scale farms that produce organic food and are more integrated into local markets lack the know-how to apply for CAP subsidies. In many cases, this is due to bureaucratic constraints. But critics of the CAP also point to a lack of political will — be it in national capitals or inside the European Commission — to move toward more sustainable farming models.

Marco Contiero, agriculture policy director for Greenpeace in the EU, said the current CAP was not doing enough to drive a transition toward these new models.

“The CAP should strengthen rural-urban linkages, promoting innovative farming models that support local producers and benefit consumers, not the agricultural-industrial complex that is responsible for the health, environmental and social problems farming faces,” Contiero said. “Community-supported agriculture addresses these problems, and is one of the models that the CAP should actively support."

Landing the big money

While such models may seem to be a solution to some of the EU's environmental dilemmas, experts say funding such a transition is very difficult, especially for the biggest farms, which sell on international markets, can suffer from high levels of debt and are used to more conventional farming.

The most obvious way for Troonbeeckx to apply for funds would be as a "sub measure" under the so-called Pillar 2 of the CAP, dedicated to rural development spending. But most of the CAP budget is poured into Pillar 1, which provides the direct payments to big landowners.

As the EU has pledged to make the CAP greener, Europe's farm ministers are now scrambling to ensure that there is no devastating cut to those all-important direct payments to large estates under Pillar 1 when the bloc loses Britain's sizeable contributions to its budget.

European Commissioner Phil Hogan sought to allay fears about an assault on the core of the CAP last month and said he wanted to be "crystal clear about our commitment to the maintenance of direct payments."

Beyond the prioritization of major landholdings, Troonbeeckx identified another barrier to the development of more ecological farming models: a lack of trained and passionate people who know how to work the land.

There are, for example, roughly only 20 graduates every year from Landwijzer, a training center for organic and biodynamic agriculture and food in Flanders. Roughly 70 percent of those graduates go on to form their own CSA farms — though those farms can often take years to establish due to a lack of available land and high prices.

Ineke Docx, a specialist trainer at Landwijzer, said that although CSA farms in the region receive no CAP funding, access to more cash would be welcome. Many such farms, for example, need to build a water reserve but cannot afford such an investment, she said.

"We do not think that the CAP should play favorites with one model or another; that is up to communities and markets themselves to sort out" — Robert de Graeff, senior policy adviser, European Landowners' Organization

"Today, the subsidies that exist are often made to big investments and big farms to help them get even bigger,” she said.

Robert de Graeff, senior policy adviser for the European Landowners' Organization, which represents private landowners, said there was no need for policymakers to positively discriminate in favor of CSA farms.

"We do not think that the CAP should play favorites with one model or another; that is up to communities and markets themselves to sort out," he said.

He said the ELO supported CSA farming as long as it "creates better values and outcomes for the farmer and producer."

De Graeff also pointed out that CSA farms were not restricted to making applications for support under the lower-budget Pillar 2 programs. He said they would have access to direct payments inside the CAP's more generous Pillar 1 because such farmers can be defined as "a group of legal persons." Small-scale farmers can also apply for additional payments for young farmers, he added.

Passion for pasture

Troonbeeckx, who uses decades-old tractors in order not to depend on bank loans, cites evidence that people like him can build up scale.

Clad in his striking combo of yellow hoodie underneath a red cardigan, he speaks with admiration for Joel Salatin, a renowned American beef farmer with a 550-acre farm in Virginia.

Instead of herding corn-fed cows in colossal barns, Salatin moves cattle from one pasture to the next, ensuring his meat is 100 percent organic and free of chemicals.

Then, once his prize-winning bovines have munched through all the grass, he moves in portable coops for chickens who then fertilise the land naturally with their droppings. All of his produce is then sold locally to more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets, and a farmers’ market.

Troonbeeckx’s farm, though nowhere near as big, follows a similar ethic.

He employs complex rotational methods that allow his cows to eat the grass, fertilize the soil and then change location to a new pasture so that vegetables can be planted using his newly-enriched soil. But getting such projects off the ground is much harder than it looks — in his first years of farming, he had to work in a restaurant just to makes ends meet.

“Only people who have dreamt of being a farmer since a child should do it. It’s something that burns deep insides,” Troonbeeckx said. “If that fire does not burn then do not do it.”