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motohagiography

- paying a team of day labour workers

- hay / feed delivery

- combine/equipment rental

- equipment resale

- livestock

- farm vehicle sales / repair

It's probably fine, and I hear you can eat bugs.

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> - paying a team of day labour workers

It's illegal to pay minimum wage in cash, due to employers abusing and underpaying vulnerable people. (Any amount over the minimum wage can be paid cash, but there has to be a bank payment made for at least the minimum wage.)

Source: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-schijnconstr...

> - hay / feed delivery

> - combine/equipment rental

> - livestock

> - farm vehicle sales / repair

B2B transactions like that are done by billing. The other side wouldn't normally be very receptive to a cash payment.

> Any amount over the minimum wage can be paid cash, but there has to be a bank payment made for at least the minimum wage.

Interesting. In France, you can ask for your wages to be paid cash, but only if it's not more than €1500. Minimum wage as of May 1st 2023 is €1383.08.

Tell me you don't know much about how payments are done outside USA without saying so directly.

All of the above are very likely done electronically in Netherlands.

Denmark has an even lower limit (€2700) and there has been no problems with this. Denmark no longer supports payments using checks.

I've never heard of anybody being paid wages in cash in Denmark. It's so uncommon that the Danish IRS even had to explain it is actually possible to do so.

I’m pretty sure the 3000 limit is not at all a huge issue in any of those cases pretty much anywhere in Europe and bank transfers are also cheap and instant.

Not that I agree with this ban. I really don’t but focusing on farmers specifically is very strange when farming is so heavily commercialized, especially in the Netherlands.

Bank transfers are cheap and instant when both parties in the transaction have a working bank account, which means they had a residence where they could receive mail, which means they had government identification, etc.

having an address and ID is not so much a problem, it is keeping your address and ID valid once a few dozen people in authority can live for years by charging money for lots of reasons to renew them, and perhaps also problems for you if you do not behave.

This is as old as countries themselves. You must be intellectually dishonest to ignore these historically crucial patterns.

You can get a functioning bank account usually in less than 30 minutes by downloading an app as long as you have a valid ID (no verified address is needed)

But yeah, if you’re not a citizen and don’t live in the EU it might be tricky (then again AFAIK bringing large amounts of cash from a third country is not that straightforward either).

What does this have to do with Dutch farmers, though?

EU is working towards requiring banks to provide homeless EU citizens with a bank account. Some countries have already implemented this. https://koronapay.com/transfers/europe/en/blog/how-to-open-a...

For paper mails some shelters allow for picking up post and in some countries you can get the mail as "Poste Restante" (i.e. pick up at post office).

Then people will surely use bank transfers voluntarily, eh? Why make them illegal?

Farming is under attack all throughout the EU, especially the Netherlands.

How?

Also, again, how is this specifically harming farmers more than anyone else?

If someone is paying for farm equipment, vehicles or livestock with tens of thousands in cash, you can absolutely be certain something very, very dodgy is going on. At the very least someone is doing some serious tax evasion.

So sounds like exactly the kind of transaction this law is supposed to block. working as intended.

You might be surprised by the volume of agricultural transactions settled in cash. Not sure about the Netherlands specifically.

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