A young Dutch showman. A quiet hand on a halter. A letter that ends with two words no family should ever have to read: “Het spijt me.”
If you’ve spent any time at a European Holstein show in the last few years, you’ve seen this face.
Clean white shirt, black leather leadstrap slung over one shoulder, one hand resting lightly under a black cow’s jaw, eyes lifted past her poll toward the judge. Not posing. Not performing. Just working — the way the really good young showpeople do, where the cow is the star and the handler is almost invisible.
That’s Jacco Betting. He was 22.
He died on April 12, 2026, one month and two days shy of his 23rd birthday. Tonight — Friday, April 17 — his family will open the doors of the home farm at Sijsamaweg 2i in Heemserveen from 18:30 to 20:30 for neighbors, friends, and the dairy community to say goodbye, before gathering in a private circle.
We’re writing from Canada. We didn’t know him. And we can’t stop looking at these photographs.
The Letter He Left Behind
The Betting family made the brave, generous choice to print Jacco’s own words at the top of his rouwkaart. Translated from the Dutch:
“My whole life, I’ve followed my feelings, especially in choices. That’s always been good for me — and so is this choice. It feels so right that after today, I can stop with everything. Rest. Please keep in mind this is what I’ve wanted for a long time. I’m sorry.”
Honestly? Reading that is like being hit with a cold bucket of barn water. He isn’t angry. He isn’t blaming anyone. He’s just… done. And he wants the people he loves to know he thought about it for a long time, and that he’s at peace with the choice, even if they never will be.
That’s the part that guts you. A 22-year-old shouldn’t be that tired.
The Hands That Told the Real Story
Look at the second photo. Black and white. Masterrind hoodie. Head down, clippers humming, working a topline smooth in the fitting chute. No audience. No ribbon on the line yet. Just a kid and a cow and the kind of patient, repetitive care that only people who truly love this work ever bother to learn.
This is the Jacco the show crowd knew. Early mornings. Late nights. That particular Dutch dairyman calmed around big animals that you can’t fake, and you can’t teach. The kind of young man every breeder hopes will walk through their barn door one day and ask if he can help out for the week.
He was, by every account, one of the good ones, which is exactly why this hurts the way it does.
What the Dairy World Needs to Say Out Loud
The Bullvine has written about this before. A 31-year-old was lost in a manure pit. Families in the middle of calving season suddenly short one pair of hands and one whole heart. And now a 22-year-old showman in Overijssel who loved his cows enough to show up for them that beautifully, and carried something heavy enough to write that letter.
Here’s what the data keeps telling us, and what we keep failing to act on:
- Farmers, and especially young farmers, die by suicide at rates well above the general population in nearly every dairy country on earth.
- The workload is relentless, the margins are brutal, the isolation is real, and the cultural script still says you handle it on your own.
- “I’m following my feelings” sounds poetic. It also sounds like someone who no longer believed anyone else could carry the weight with him.
We can keep publishing genotype rankings and auction results. We should. But if we don’t also say, clearly and often, that no cow, no quota, no classification score, no family legacy is worth a young farmer’s life — then we aren’t really in the business of serving this industry. We’re just in the business of selling it.
To the Betting Family
We don’t know you. But tonight, while the yard fills with neighbors and the coffee pot never quite empties, please know that strangers across an ocean are thinking of you. Sander and Anneke, who raised a son kind enough to apologize in his last letter. Sharon and Thijs, Ilona and Jarnick, who lost a brother, the cows will keep looking for at the gate.
You did not fail him. His own handwriting says so. Grief will try to tell you otherwise for a long, long time. Don’t let it.
Rust zacht, Jacco
Rest easy, Jacco. The barn lights are on somewhere tonight because of young men like you, and they’ll stay on because of what young men like you taught us — even, and maybe especially, in leaving.
The Bullvine extends its deepest condolences to the Betting family of Heemserveen and to the Dutch dairy community mourning one of its own.
