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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

I have a few issues with this pro Netherlands agriculture piece:

1. Vegetables grown in the Netherlands tend to taste very bland in my experience (personal taste), tough I can't complain for the price as they're usually the cheapest option in local supermarkets. If you want great tasting organic veggies you get them at the farmers market which has higher prices than the supermarkets and is only open on certain times of the day/week making convenience an issue as well.

2. The conditions I witnessed in which animals are farmed in the Netherlands are appalling.

The amount of diseased animals (infected bloody wounds and swollen limbs from puss), overpacked in their own feces, will turn anyone vegetarian.

To be fair, the Netherlands is not alone here but in general, then animal conditions I witnessed in places like Germany, Austria or Switzerland were on average better than in the Netherlands.

Disclaimer: I work in tech for the farming industry

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> Vegetables grown in the Netherlands tend to taste very bland in my experience (personal taste)

I see this raised often. It's almost exclusively because the cultivars used are specifically chosen for yield and hardiness in transport and storage. The "organic" stuff grown in a farm 20km away and only needs to be transported for half an hour, on the other hand, are just cultivars that can be selected for reasons other than hardiness. This type of cultivar can also be mass-produced although it becomes a lot more expensive for the producer and the customer.

> the cultivars used are specifically chosen for yield and hardiness in transport and storage.

This is the core of the problem, and it's obviously not the Netherlands exclusively, it's a feature of modern agribusiness.

We've spend decades mostly optimizing for things that are not taste and nutrition, and it worked - often at the expense of those things.

A lot of this is on consumers of course. Voting with your wallets for bland but uniform-and-pretty has a knock on effect.

A really good book about this is Michael Pollan's: The Omnivore Dillema: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omnivore%27s_Dilemma

I can't recommend it enough. It really changed my mind about food.

1. The good stuff is for export.

2. Would you reckon your experience applies to the average animal farm in the Netherlands or does it apply to the farms where your tech gets applied?

1. It was the stuff for export (I'm not based in the Netherlands)

2. My anecdotal evidence is restricted only to the farms I visited which in my opinion tend to represent the typical/average medium to large scale farms catering to the usual meat suppliers you'll find in local supermarket or big butcher/meat chains regardless of country.

1. I guess we're overproducing the bland stuff then.

2. Fair enough. My own anecdotal evidence hasn't been that bad. But then again, I haven't seen an industrialized pigpen yet.

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