Farmers in the Netherlands

 

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

The Netherlands is the size of Wales. It is also the second-largest agricultural exporter on the planet by value, shifting roughly €100 billion of food a year out of a country you can drive across in an afternoon. The system that built this has been running, refining itself, since the 1950s, and feeding most of northern Europe in the process. It is also the diet that built the Dutch themselves. In 1850, the average Dutchman was 5 foot 5, among the shortest in Europe. Today he stands 6 foot, the tallest in the world. The variable, by every cross-country analysis ever run on the question, was dairy. Cheese, butter, milk, repeated every day, for six generations, on a national scale. The Netherlands grew its population upward by feeding them what the soil and the cow could produce together. In 2019, a Dutch court ruled that the country's nitrogen emissions, principally ammonia from livestock manure, exceeded EU limits. In 2022, the government published a target: halve nitrogen emissions by 2030. According to its own modelling, this required closing roughly 11,200 farms and significantly reducing livestock numbers on a further 17,600. €25 billion was allocated to buy farmers out. Voluntary first. Then forced, if the voluntary route did not deliver. Nitrogen minister Christianne van der Wal informed the country, in public, that there was no better offer coming. The farmers responded by driving tractors onto motorways, blocking distribution centres, and inverting the Dutch flag. Forty thousand of them gathered in central Netherlands in a single day. The police were briefly issued with shovels because the tear gas was running low and the farmers had brought slurry. The protest did not stop the policy. The BBB party, formed by farmers in response, briefly became the largest force in the Dutch Senate, the coalition government softened some elements, and the rest continued. The Dutch dairy farmer who built his herd in 1985 is, in 2026, either gone, going, or being offered 120% of his land's value to leave. He is being offered this because the cow that built the tallest population on Earth is, by spreadsheet, now the problem. Meanwhile, in the same country, Schiphol airport, KLM, and the Dutch chemical industry collectively emit nitrogen oxides the dairy sector cannot match, and have been treated with significantly more diplomatic care. The farmer is the easiest fight because the farmer is one man, on one piece of ground, with one tractor. The chemical plant is owned by a board. Boards do not get bought out at 120%. They get consulted.