The agricultural revolution in the Netherlands from two perspectives

Which country do you think is the second largest food exporter in the world behind the US? I guess the title of the article is a hint, but yes, the Netherlands, and they are the largest exporter of potatoes in the world also. This sound almost impossible taking into account they are so small they had to build dams to gain terrain, but it is true, and on this article, we will talk about both sides of the story.

You may be wondering why I’m writing about this topic since it is something that is not common to talk about, I found out about it on the YouTube channel VisualPolitik two years ago or so, you can either watch their English or Spanish channel, the video was about how the Netherlands became an agricultural superpower, which was really interesting and I’ll show some of the data about it later on the article. I have to admit that all I got was one side of the history and I thought everything was perfect and I did not consider the other perspective until this October, on a trip to the Highlands in Scotland, where I met, on the hostel me and my friends were staying at, the owner of a consultancy firm about organic agriculture on the Netherlands, who explained me the negative effects of such incredible agricultural progress.

This made me really question my opinion on many topics and I realized how important is to dive a little bit deeper in order to have a more realistic perspective, on that moment, we had already talked about creating this platform so I wrote it down on my post ideas list because I wanted to do research on the impacts of agriculture on our planet, health and how this sector needs to increase production in the following years to feed the growing population.

Population numbers are going to greatly increase in the near future and we, as humans, have the huge challenge of doubling the production of food without deteriorating the environment. We have been improving our farming techniques for the last two thousand years and farm surplus gradually increased allowing people to do something else and specializing creating the economy in which we live nowadays. The greatest breakthrough was undoubtedly in the early 20th century when the Haber-Bosch method for synthesizing ammonium nitrate was developed, which allowed as to provide nutrients to the soil relying less on crop rotation and animal manures and greatly increasing production, it is estimated that around half of the food produced today is thanks to this invention.

One term that crystalizes what needs to be done would be “sustainable intensification” which means producing more food from the same area of land while reducing environmental impact by the following measures: (1) Stopping the expansion of agriculture in pristine areas, (2) closing yield gaps on underperforming existing agricultural lands, (3) increasing agricultural resource use efficiencies and (4) changing human diets and reducing food waste.

In the future, I may write about this and how to tackle each issue, but let’s get back on track and talk about how the Netherlands became such agricultural superpower. Agriculture is one of the most subsidized sectors and the European Union has the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which gets over 35% of the European Union budget, which is much lower than the 73% of the budget that used to be in 1985. You may be thinking that the Netherlands may produce such large quantities of food thanks to this subsidies, but that could not be further from the truth since their subsidies are insignificant compared to the ones of Spain or France

The reason for this progress is as usual technology, they use, for example, self-driving tractors or drones that monitor the crops to achieve resource optimisation. This productivity improvement is thanks to the University of Wageningen, which created an area of technology development known as “Food Valley”, just like Stanford is the base of Silicon Valley. The money that was previously used for subsidies started being used for research on this university, which makes a more sustainable business model. A quarter of university funding is private which helps to ensure that research grants are destined to things that the market demands which helps to make a better or cheaper product to the customer.

An example of their advancements would be that they have been able to produce tomatoes reducing the use of water, usually, in the US, one kilogram of tomatoes requires 126 litres of water, but using the hydroponic methods developed at the university, they were able to produce the same quantity of tomatoes only using 8 litres of water.

All this sounds great, but this research and technology must be implanted on the real world, and the Netherlands created the Agricultural Council Offices where farmers can go and get advice and inform themselves on what is the best alternative for what they want to grow and the specific circumstances.

But sometimes if things seem too good to be true is because they are, and that Dutch guy from the hostel helped me realized that, so now, let’s talk about the negative effects of this revolution. Even though the Netherlands is the most productive and efficient in the EU, their emissions of ammonia, surpluses of nitrogen and phosphorus, and use of pesticides per hectare is among the highest also. A lot of this issues is because of the livestock, they even need to import livestock feed and nitrogen and phosphorus surplus per unit of product are higher due to the high use of manure from such livestock.

To reduce nutrient emissions from agriculture, since the 1980s measures have been introduced which strongly reduced surpluses of them and nitrate concentrations in groundwater and surface waters, but this is not enough and a large part of the country exceed the levels of nitrate and phosphorus on the waters recommended by the Water Framework Directive, especially in the southern sandy and loess regions. Despise this considerable reductions, they still far surpass those in other European Countries.

Another relevant issue is the lack of biodiversity, which protect us in the case of a disease that affects crops, putting all the eggs in one basket usually is not the best approach. Using these more productive techniques also means that the carbon sequestration in the soil that could be produced by more traditional ways of farming are lost.

But not everything is bad news, since 2000 water consumption was reduced by 90% and the use of pesticides was greatly reduced too thanks to the constant monitoring which allows acting faster to stop the issues before they spread, just the same happened to antibiotics used in poultry and livestock, since 2009 have been reduced by 60%. Also is a big industry that exports over 92 billion in 2017, and this does not take into account the technology exports related to agriculture.

Just like Ernst van den Ende, managing director of WUR’s Plant Sciences Group explains, this science-driven approach combined with the market is the way to meet the challenge that lies ahead of producing more food in the next decades that in the last 10.000 years combined. But as we know, the market does not usually care about the environment since there is not a clear distribution of ownership of public goods, such as aquifers, which makes it difficult to put a price for the negative externalities derived from these market activities. Therefore, the society should increase demand for more sustainable ways of producing food (and goods in general) using public awareness on these issues, demanding regulation and labelling that help us make more informed decisions and using this information for carefully selecting our food considering the impact on the environment.

Some academic papers and articles used:

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1573521413000183#bib0020
• https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/
• https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00013/full
• http://webdocs.alterra.wur.nl/pdffiles/alterraRapporten/rapport%20948.pdf