What does “farm differently” actually look like? Are there viable replacements for the chemicals being targeted? (Guessing not, given the farmers’ reaction.)
What does “farm differently” actually look like? Are there viable replacements for the chemicals being targeted? (Guessing not, given the farmers’ reaction.)
> not all farmers will continue in business
The farming differently mostly has to do with scale. We're already really good at producing efficiently, but we're building massive (relatively, nothing compared to the US) farms for meat and dairy and we're doing this right next to nature preserves. Our country is so tiny, that pretty much everything is right next to each other.
Over the past decades, through farming and related lobbies, we've seen a huge increase in the size of the farms over here. The economies of scale have benefited the share holders of food companies and banks, but not the farmers, because every penny they save gets cut from their income by these food companies. This causes farmers to aim for even larger farms with more automation, which requires investment, which benefits the banks.
Now, the government is telling the farmers we need to reduce the number of farms and the size of the remaining ones. After being fucked over mostly by large companies for decades, they feel like the government is now targeting them unfairly. They see all their investments might be useless in the future and they're angry because of it.
All of this is exacerbated by leftover Covid anger and conspiracy groups adding to the fire and joining the protests, which are becoming more violent and their demands are becoming less coherent.
Why would you guess that? Farmers don't generally like changing their habits, and are usually very happy to put the burden on the commons.
In this case, the farmers are unhappy because the netherlands are a massive nox producer (https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2019/03/Nitrogen_d...), this comes from a huge livestock sector, and the government has decided to implement severe restriction on nox emissions, especially around nature reserves where it's creating wastelands.