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Comment by jurmous | Hacker News Reader

To understand the nitrogen crisis (Nitrogen Oxides and Ammonia) in the Netherlands you have to see the nitrogen dioxide map:

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2019/03/Nitrogen_d...

And most of it is from agriculture (landbouw) 46% and abroad (buitenland)

https://www.rivm.nl/sites/default/files/2019-09/grafiek_herk...

Because the Netherlands is the second largest food exporter in the world after the USA:

https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/how-the-netherlands...

So something has to be done to lessen output of Ammonia and Nitrogen Oxides as they are destroying the local nature ecosystems.

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> So something has to be done to lessen output of Ammonia and Nitrogen Oxides as they are destroying the local nature ecosystems.

I think a majority of people in NL would sacrifice the local nature (to some degree) to solve this crisis. The reason this isn't being done is because these are European rules. Which Dutch democracy cannot simply overturn.

Point being, it's European rules rather than concern for nature, that is the trigger.

> I think a majority of people in NL would sacrifice the local nature (to some degree) to solve this crisis.

Maybe, but that is just because the farmers have a great PR machine going. It does not make sense to sacrifice local nature for an billion dollar industry that mainly (70%) produces for export. Its not like the Dutch food supply will suffer from this in any way.

It does not make sense to keep farming. But the extreme correction we currently have is not worth the nature tradeoff. Faith in our government is tanking with Groningen's earthquakes and the toeslagaffaire. Adding to this the government decimating many citizens who acted in good faith is not good.

We are stuck between the option of having a government being an untrustworthy partner, or breaking European laws and sacrificing nature.

> Adding to this the government decimating many citizens who acted in good faith is not good.

Is it really decimating citizens though? There's 35 billion euros available to compensate them. From what I've seen of the protests/blockades, it seems farmers are mostly upset they can't continue farming the way they currently do. I understand having to change your business practice and/or career sucks, but it's not the end of the world, and it has happened to millions of people that were working in declining industries before.

Furthermore, lots of Dutch farmers have a difficult future ahead of them anyway. Half of the farmers are over 55, and 30% of them don't have a successor lined up. To me it seems like taking the government buyout and retiring is a pretty good way out for them.

The "local nature" (barely anything left), has already been sacrificed for decades to this. For example, a large drop in insect populations has been recorded, likely because of intensive farming practices. So continuing to do this (apart from EU regulation) does not seem to me like it is very wise. Agriculture is also very dependent on some kind of local nature existing (think pollinators). If you don't care about nature at all, it will be a very dead place soon enough. We are also part of nature, after all.

Note that some of the nature areas are very much man-made. Generally they are the result of either over-farming or over-logging which really reduced the soil quality and gave space for species that can handle poor soil. That is making the impact of nitrous compounds much bigger because it fertilizes the soil which displaces the species used to very poor soil.

As for insect population, that is to do with pesticides, and horticulture. The farming problem causing these protests is nitrous compound emissions caused by keeping livestock. That is a totally different group of farmers.

> I think a majority of people in NL would sacrifice the local nature (to some degree) to solve this crisis.

The only crisis is that farmers have known for years they're absolutely major polluters and something would have to give, and as far as their concerned what has to give is the country.

> Point being, it's European rules rather than concern for nature, that is the trigger.

Bullshit.

The EU set aside money for financing nature reserves in member countries. The netherlands were happy to apply for 150 of them or so, and take the money.

We applied for these rules decades ago. Now, we regret that, and I presume we would be willing to pay back the money to roll back the application. If we got more money from the areas than we are now willing to spend on solving this, that would be a separate outrageous government decision.

>Based on measurements gathered by the Copernicus Sentinel-5P mission between April and September 2018, the image shows high levels of nitrogen dioxide in London, Paris, Brussels, western Germany, Milan and Moscow. Nitrogen dioxide pollutes the air mainly as a result of traffic and the combustion of fossil fuel in industrial processes. It has a significant impact on human health, contributing particularly to respiratory problems.

It seems that farming isn't even mentioned in the issue of nitrogen compounds produced. Maybe they should work harder on the elimination of oil as an energy source.

That image and the description only applies to nitrogen dioxide; the problem in the Netherlands is mostly ammonia, which is for >85% produced by farming.

https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/dossier/dossier-stikstof/stikstofem...

> the problem in the Netherlands is mostly ammonia

This is not true, and the article you're linking to doesn't support your claim. The majority of the nitrogen containing emissions are NOx. About the differences in harmfulness between both gasses not much is known, at least not when it's about soil pollution. NOx is a powerful greenhouse gas though, while NHx is not.

> This is not true, and the article you're linking to doesn't support your claim. The majority of the nitrogen containing emissions are NOx.

Only by weight, but one molecule of NO (30 u) and especially NO2 (46 u) is much heavier than one molecule of NH3 (17 u). If you read literally the next sentence in the article, they convert the gross weight into amount of nitrogen, and the ammonia contains twice the nitrogen content.

We are already working hard on this: .nl is the country with the lowest average CO2 emmissions per new car sold in the EU (and thus also nitrogen most likely). We're finally building decent amounts of wind turbines (still a shame that we dutch don't lead in this).

However, farming emissions have plateaued: https://www.rivm.nl/sites/default/files/2022-06/Grafiek%20Em...

Why is it better to spread out nitrogenes over a larger area? If they're the result of food production (well, of current technology of food production), than that won't change the amount of nitrogenes, just the location.

If anything, higher concentration of nitrogen sources in Netherlands could make it easier to solve the problem, centrally.

I thought you meant per capita, but I looked it up and it really is the second largest in absolute terms - 80B$ versus 120B$ for the US. It's insane that the netherlands exports over half as much as a country 20x it's size.

That is one heck of a blob over London and that area does lack farms. Indeed looking at somewhere like Spain and you would think all that fruit and vegtable production didn't exist.

So is farming more a scapegoat for these emmisions?

No, farming (fertilizer, manure) produces nitrogen oxide. Cars also produce nitrogen oxide, which is why metropolitan areas also show up.

It's mostly about the ammonia produced by animals (manure).

Animal waste in general.

Anyone with a dog and a yard learns how devastating their waste can be to plants. Now multiple that by 10,000.

Yes and wasn't dismissing farming as being a source and mindful cars were probably huge factor in this. But thought was worth opening that up for debate as many will see such data and run with their conclusions.

Thank you.

According to above graph, 6,1% of the output in the Netherlands is coming from traffic compared to 46% from farming. And mind most of the output comes from farm animals like cows, pigs and chickens which the Netherlands has a lot on a small surface area. It is not as much caused by growing crops and fruits.

NO2 is mostly generated from burning fuel, that's why in most of the countries in the map you only see yellow blobs over major cities due to higher car traffic, and almost no NO2 in rural areas. The major blob over central europe and south uk makes no sense and I don't think that excessive farming can justify it. If you look at a worldwide map of NO2 emissions [1] you can see that besides that large area in Europe only China has concentrations of NO2 that high.

[1] https://so2.gsfc.nasa.gov/no2/pix/regionals/scripts/sliderav...

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