After graduation from Wageningen University in 1980 and a career in various agriculture related jobs I joined Wageningen  University again in 2001 as marketing manager for Plant Research International and later as accountmanager Asia for Wageningen International. Between 2012 and 2014 I retired and started the course on History at Utercht University. In 2020 I obtained my MA. Currently I am active as an external PhD candidate, studying the urban agriculture in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth century: how important was urban agriculture and to what extent did it change in conjunction with urban development in the Northern Netherlands during the long sixteenth century (1500-1650)?