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Comment by ragebol | Hacker News Reader

Big discussion in the Netherlands now, and going on to some extent for decades already, about: does it make sense for such a small country to have this much intensive agriculture?

As the article mentions, the nitrogen deposited in the little patches of what should pass for nature are killing it.

Nice to be self-sufficient in food, but we're more than that in some areas. But say something negative about farmers and you'll have protesters in big tractors blocking highways and city centers.

The parties currently trying to form a government will only let these problems fester and not make hard choices to put an end to them one way or another.

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One of the four forming parties IS the farmers... They keep holding up these signs that say "no farmers no food", while we all know a huge part of it is for export.

Practically nobody is against the small farmers, which is the sad image they like to prop up, but there are plenty of them that drive around in a Tesla while their fully automated factory chomps through the never ending supply of animal carcasses.

>One of the four forming parties IS the farmers... They keep holding up these signs that say "no farmers no food", while we all know a huge part of it is for export.

Well, export or domestic, the "no food" part still stands.

> Well, export or domestic, the "no food" part still stands.

More & more I tend to regard Dutch farmland as a factory: one that happens to 'manufacture' agricultural products (mostly grass & maize to feed cows), using land as part of the machinery.

The "feed own population" is 2nd tier consideration. And as an industry, it uses a big % of the surface area in our densely populated country, while adding relatively little to our economy (~2% or so, iirc).

Now if land were plentiful that wouldn't be a (big) problem. But with agriculture taking the space of almost non-existant 'nature', all the environmental problems resulting from its intensity, animal welfare issues etc, this is a problem.

Dutch population is a bit 50/50 on this I'd say. Much sympathy for farmers but yes the problems are real. But farmers have a strong lobby here so probably not much will change. More automation, faster-growing crops, bigger farms, lower prices for what's produced, middlemen (like supermarket chains) squeeze them like crazy while raking in profits for their owners or shareholders.

Not a great time to be a farmer in the NL.

Edit: the high-tech agri & research stuff (as described in article), that is good stuff though.

> The "feed own population" is 2nd tier consideration. And as an industry, it uses a big % of the surface area in our densely populated country, while adding relatively little to our economy (~2% or so, iirc).

TFA says total agricultural exports in 2021 was $108.4 billion and according to Google the GDP was just over $1 trillion, which is closer to a tenth of the economy just in exports not 2%. Am I missing something?

https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2020/19/landbouw-droeg-in-20...

It’s only 1.4%. If you are generous you end up with at most 7% by adding in a lot of related industry and transportation of goods as well.

Then where does the $108 billion of exports come from? Even at 7% against 1 trillion gdp the math just doesn't make any sense to me if there’s that much in export.

Is most of the export capital just going towards importing fertilizer so it’s not counted towards GDP or something?

I have no idea of the specific numbers, but a component of GDP is indeed _net_ exports.

If you export 100B and import 100B the trade would account for 0% of the GDP.

At a glance, NL seem to import quite a lot of agricultural stuff, even if it exports more.

https://oec.world/en/profile/country/nld?yearlyTradeFlowSele...

It's also the EU country which uses the most ferts and pesticides. I wonder of there are any beekeepers left in NL, or bees for that matter. I've seen black bees in a reservation in Sicily. Amazing. I'd like to see them again in ten years.

Why do european farmers seem to have an aversion towards selling land? In the US it seems like farmers are always trying to cash out their land for a developer as soon as there is demand. Look at the farmland interface at most american cities and you can see active development on satellite views. Meanwhile over in amsterdam some of the most prime real estate not far from the central train station is still just farms. Seems to me they could stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars selling off these lots for development, then invest that money and make more than tight margin farming ever would have presumably.

You can't just sell land for development. If the land is zoned for argicultural use you can't just build a suburb there. Zoning doesn't end at city limits here. Every square meter of land has allowed uses assigned to it and changing it takes a long time with rounds of protests and consultations.

Zoning and protests over zoning exists in the US too. I wonder why the netherlands remain so restrictive however especially given a housing crisis and not as much of a need for agriculture land today as in centuries past.

It's a country where everything is very well organized. There are rules for everything and corruption is low.

One of the consequences is that it takes a long time and serious investments to get new construction projects going.

Another big reason is the CO2 crisis, which is partially caused by... Well, you know.

Why is France seeing these protests as well even though it has 12x the land?

No it does not. You could phase out more than 60% of the Dutch farmers, which would reclaim 40% of the land (from the 66% they currently use), losing less than 1% of the BDP, and the country would STILL have plenty of food.

>and the country would STILL have plenty of food

I did write: "export or domestic".

The country would still have "plenty of food", but the second largest production of food would be affected.

Affected, yes. That's not the same as "no food". Having farmers in the Netherlands is not a binary choice.

Which is not a very big production at all because most countries that don't qualify as failed states rightly organize their food production independently. The biggest buyer tends to be China who doesn't need the food to begin with, it's just buying on generational paranoia.

The argument being made is "farmers take care of our food! We need them!" That is what "no farmers no food" means: "no farmers, no food for us". Everyone understands that's what it means.

And that's just not true, as much of it is for export, as was mentioned.

> One of the four forming parties IS the farmers... They keep holding up these signs that say "no farmers no food", while we all know a huge part of it is for export.

Huge swathes of land in the Netherlands are used to grow flowers, which are definitely not food and are far from being critical for a society to subsist. They may be making fortunes selling them but let's not pretend the whole agricultural industry is mobilized to prevent famines.

I live in North Brabant, and around here, it mostly cows and maize/corn.

Somehow, some people think of this as 'nature' (it's indeed green, I guess), while the original would be heath lands on poor soils. Now, with all the nitrogen deposits, other species (nettles, grasses, prickly bramble bushes) that are less resilient to that come to flourish and take over the little heath lands that are left.

The implication that a "good" farmer should not be able to afford a car makes your statement about being pro-small farmers seem disingenuous. While I've read similar comments a few times recently, the "but" is always ridiculous. If a farmer manages to carve out enough free time to drive to the city to protest for a few days, surely he or she is a mega-rich, evil factory farmer, etc. - same story as the Canadian truckers a couple years ago. Not to be provocative, but I find it interesting that city-slicker posh leftist ecofascists somehow managed to convince themselves that working-class people such as farmers and truck drivers are part of the "privileged oppressor" category by virtue of protesting against policies that hurt them.

Calling it just "a car" seems disingenuous. My post mentioned a Tesla, which is a luxury expense the average Dutch person is not able to afford.

The whole point was to make a clear distinction between the working-class farmer and the mega-rich, evil factory farmer. The latter loves to act like they are the former.

I know a high school graduate who drives Uber part-time for a living and bought a brand-new Tesla with no downpayment recently (i.e. at elevated interest rates), so that's not a very good discriminator.

Anekdotal outlier. In 2022 there were 42,600 registered Tesla owners in the Netherlands. It's a luxury expense, no matter how you turn it.

Besides, it was just an illustrative way of saying "plenty of farmers are pretty well off". A bit silly to focus on that part of my argument instead of the actual point, which is that most Dutch people feel those big earners are the bigger problem.

Sure. But I've never seen any evidence that small farmers aren't aligned with the protests. Is there any, or are the wealthy farmers simply a convenient target?

Smaller farmers generally work hard for small margins. They are easily mobilized by the big agricultural companies that hide behind them.

Whatever measures are taken should, in my opinion at least, focus on the highly automated mass polluting bio industry and subsidize smaller, eco- and animal-friendly businesses instead.

The massive food surplus clearly leaves plenty of space to trim down a bit. The resulting CO2 decrease might even allow a few new houses to be built.

That's a completely different conversation from the broad condemnation of protests that affect all farmers based on the premise that farmers shouldn't be able to afford nice things.

It's a fair point, but, like other business owners (large or small), a farmer with a Tesla in the Netherlands is likely driving a company car and taking advantage of the tax incentives for company electric cars.

Forget about the car, many people have a company car and they're mostly EVs due to tax incentives.

The real story with the farmers is that there are 3 very large farming companies responsible for more emissions than all traffic in the country combined. That's close to 10x more emissions than the whole aviation industry. These are billion euro+ sized businesses, with a huge environmental impact. They pay PR firms to paint these "small farmer" stories while they're just large industrial polluters.

The main person for the political "farmers party" has a long history of being deeply involved with these companies. She's basically their lobbyist.

Example: Van Drie Group, over 3 billion revenue last year from veal. In Dutch, but a bit more background here: https://www.groene.nl/artikel/het-merk-boer

> But say something negative about farmers and you'll have protesters in big tractors blocking highways and city centers.

At this point they should be called what they are: agricultural corporations.

I don't know if the ecological cost of such a model, and by extension the model itslef, is anything to be proud of.

The nitrogen effects killing what is left over of nature is something that has been documented since the 80s already. Things have only changed for the worst since then.

Walk around through some greenhouse area in South Holland, or through some flower fields in North Holland, and the chemical smells in the air will give you a headache. I don't understand how people can live there. And I'm surprised they don't see an explosion of cancer rates locally.

No one wants to unsettle such a gret export balance, especially now with the farmer's party maybe joining the government.

So I guess the water tomatoes and the plofkippen are here to stay.

There is often similar discussion in California, who produces much of the country's agriculture, but uses huge amounts of natural resources to do so (particularly water).

How much taxes are these companies bringing in?

Given that farming in general is about 1-2% of GDP and farmers get a lot of subsidies (about 25% of the EU budget), I'd say not too much. But I don't have exact numbers here.

They're pretty taxing on the land though. But those externalities are not priced in.

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