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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

The parent did not say anything about climate and pointed to actual the problem in The Netherlands: nitrogen deposition. Our nature parks are dying because there is far too much nitrogen deposition from nearby farms.

(But our current right-wing populist government likes to pretend the problem does not exist, so they have to be slapped on the wrists by courts and the EU.)

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Now that’s a real problem, farm animal excrement is an issue. Seems like one that technology can solve?

That's what the industry has been saying here for decades and they tried a lot of things, but the problem has only gotten worse. At some point you have to say - apparently you can't fix it, so we have to buy out farmers near nature reserves.

But the farmers have been intimidating politicians by blocking highways and inner cities with tractors and other equipment. Funnily, if anyone else does this they get arrested, but farmers get a carte blanche to disrupt society.

How do we keep people fed after shutting down farming (at a reasonable cost)? The entire thing seems anti-human…

Eating less meat?

The questions are mainly targeted at the consumption of animal products: meat, dairy products and eggs. Their research shows that reducing the consumption of animal products, and therefore switching from a meat-eating to a vegetarian or vegan diet, reduces land requirements by two-thirds.

https://www.uu.nl/en/news/calculate-the-land-use-impact-of-y...

Not everyone even has to stop eating meat. Just reducing meat consumption to 1-2 days per week would go a long way.

So in other words you want to reduce everyones quality of life. Let me guess, when people object and then go vote the parties you don't like you are going to blame everyone except these kind of policies.

Make no mistake, these hypocritical do-gooder authoritarians will still be flying first class and eating steak while they force us proletariats to eat bugs and soy sloop.

Nobody wants to shut down all the farming, just reduce it. For example, the Netherlands produces 250% of its own meat consumption. Since it's subsidized, the net financial gain is very low. You could say reducing the production to 125/150% of consumption would leave enough for local consumption plus a little export in good times or a buffer in bad times.

Unfortunately, big agricultural companies hired a marketing company to start a political party which claims to be pro local/small farmers, but is actually just pro big agriculture.

The project aims at shit to no only a portions of the farms, and especially one from the meat industry. They’ll still have plenty of food.

Farm animal excrement is far from the whole picture. Fertilization is the main contributor (and animal excrement is used for that, but far from exclusively).

Yeah, fertilizer getting into the watershed is a real problem. It wreaks entire ecosystems.

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