Dutch to close down 3,000 farms

[cromwell]

To comply with EU pollution rules.
Nitrogen is apparently considered a pollutant and Dutch farms supposedly have lots of it in the soil.
Compulsory purchase will be used to shut the farms down.

So there you go. Government can and will buy your business and shut you down if they want.
I expect the dutch farmers will kick off, and that their government will crack down on them.

Food shortages, anyone?

eta - noises are being made about compulsory purchases of farmland in the UK for solar farms.
Knowing our politicians they will contrive to give us an energy shortage, dearer energy, a food shortage and more expensive food, all at once.

[Suff]

The Netherlands has a particular problem with the polder farms. They are below sea level and their nitrates are backing up in the ground and the water supply. The pumping that is done to the sea is insufficient to get the nitrates out of the soil and water.

The farmers are fighting back. Taking muck spreaders into the cities and turning them on. Leading to a comment of "It's a shit show".

I've been tracking it for about 6 months now as a couple of commentators on a site I use are Dutch. In the end the farmers will lose. The damage to the water supply is simply too severe. I recall one of my Nieces had to have bottled water brought in for her because they lived in a Scottish rural farm cottage and it had a well. The levels of nitrates in the water was so high it was dangerous for a baby.

[Workingman]

This was rumoured sometime last year, but I think the number of farms to close at that time was something like 10,000 or more.

It's apparently not the nitrogen in itself that is toxic it is when it mixes with the bodily wastage of the animals with and rain water that it creates nitrites and ammonium compounds which are toxic. At one level ammonia is a useful fertilizer but too much in rain run-off into rivers and lakes causes algal blooms and kills fish and other animals and insects that depend on them. It is a tough call and I can only sympathise with the farmers.

When I was first stationed in RAF Germany it was right on the border so I spent a lot of time in the Netherlands. There was a saying back then that everyone owned a cow. It was certainly true that as you travelled about you would see field after field full of cows.

[Suff]

Too much pressure on the farming communities and too much reliance on fertilisers to keep up.

Something has to give and this is only the beginning.

[cromwell]

Well I dunno.
But to me there are too many straws in the wind to ignore.
We are told we shouldn't eat beef or lamb.

Beef cattle and sheep / lambs need big fields to graze in. There are more pressures now than ever on land use. It's wanted for more and more houses. It's wanted for wind farms and solar farms. It's wanted for the frankly insane "rewilding" schemes. So less room for cattle and sheep.

If we want to switch away from artificial fertilisers are we going to go down the Sri Lankan route?

In Spring 2021 the then Sri Lankan President banned synthetic fertiliser and pesticide imports.
Sri Lankan farmers had to go organic. It proved disastrous, as a group of Sri Lankan scientists and agriculture experts had warned that it would.

The ban was partly designed to save $400 million on importing synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. But President Rajapaksa also argued that chemical fertilizers and pesticides were leading to “adverse health and environmental impacts” and that such industrial farming methods went against the country’s heritage of “sustainable food systems.”

BUT. The agrochemical ban caused rice production to drop 20 percent in the six months after it was implemented, causing a country that had been self-sufficient in rice production to spend $450 million on rice imports — much more than the $400 million that would’ve been saved by banning fertilizer imports.

The production of tea, Sri Lanka’s literal cash crop — it’s the country’s biggest export — fell by 18 percent. The government has had to spend hundreds of millions on subsidies and compensation to farmers in an effort to make up for the loss of productivity.

There are a lot of well meaning initiatives going around. But there is a danger here, because you know what the road to Hell is paved with!

[Suff]

Well I dunno.
There are a lot of well meaning initiatives going around. But there is a danger here, because you know what the road to Hell is paved with!

Yep, political asshats.

[Workingman]

We do know what the problem is, but nobody, yet nobody, will mention it. Population. Food production by organic means is feasible, but it reduces crop production yields - we get less food per hectare, be it livestock or vegetation. It is a well known fact.

So, we either go organic - and save the planet (allegedly), or we reduce the market, to live with its capacity, (fewer of us) or we go full tilt artificial means to feed us all, with the accepted (well hidden) damage to the environment that causes. We (the Capitalists), and also us, look to have chosen the latter option.

Go on, guess which way we are heading.

We chop down our forests, the Earths lungs, to produce soya beans and lentils.and then transport them thousands of miles as tofu, humus etc. and claim that they are environmentally friendly. No, they are not. I saw a programme where lentils grown in Canada were exported to Sri Lanka to be split and then exported back to Europe and N. America to be locked in a cupboard - how mad is that?

Avocados year round and strawberries in January? You get the drift?

[Kaz]

Well I dunno.
There are a lot of well meaning initiatives going around. But there is a danger here, because you know what the road to Hell is paved with!

Yep, political asshats.

That made me chuckle

[Suff]

Well I dunno.
There are a lot of well meaning initiatives going around. But there is a danger here, because you know what the road to Hell is paved with!

Yep, political asshats.

That made me chuckle

We aim to please... I'm not always serious....