Netherlands is the second-largest exporter of agricultural products | Hacker News Reader

Netherlands is the second-largest exporter of agricultural products

washingtonpost.com

131 pointsjseliger115 comments

According to Statista this is just a statistical anomaly as a result of the Netherlands having such large port facilities - the agricultural products are imported to the country and then exported elsewhere in Europe, which artificially bumps up the export statistics without any correlation to the actual production amount.

Which makes a lot more sense, because even an efficiently-run farming sector surely couldn't be so efficient that it can produce almost as much as the US despite being 1/50 the size. If you look at actual agricultural production the Netherlands isn't at the top of anything - the best they're doing is world #5 in cheese production.

It makes me curious, is there anywhere we can see the figures accounting for point of production?

According to WorldBank[1], they import $36 billion and export $26 billion worth of food

[1] https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/WLD/Yea...

Such journalism...

According this this 80% of the exports are manufactured in the Netherlands: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2016/23/nederland-tweede-lan...

Things like vertical food farms, huge greenhouses, intensive farming help us become (one of) the biggest

- milk and milk powder producer - apples (apples in South Africa are likely to come from the Netherlands) - tomato’s in Spain come from the Netherlands

Etc etc.

A quick Google search says Spanish yearly tomato production is 4x - 5x bigger than Netherlands'. I don't think your example, albeit possible, is correct.

Apples in South Africa are not likely to come from the Netherlands. SA exports about $736m in apples and pears, imports about $284k, not from the Netherlands.

https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/apples-and-pe...

I usually see tomatoes from Spain in stores (Austria)

It depends on what you count, as "agriculture exports" could (probably do) also include, apart from food items:

- Agricultural machines

- Seeds

- Agricultural patents on e.g. seeds

- Fertilizers

- non-food plants (flowers etc.)

- (Animal) vaccins

- other agricultural products processed ("produced") in the Netherlands

And if you count those by value, then it is certainly possible that NL gets a large share of world exports by value: other countries like Germany may produce more, but if they don't export the valuable products it won't show up on world export stats.

Re-exports are only 1/3 of their total exports - it's still incredibly impressive to have such high production for such a tiny country.

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/10/dutch-agricultural-exp...

This makes sense and is probably true, but Netherland still hits well above its weight in agricultural production; production is extremely intensive, and very high for the land area. From what I understand, Wageningen University of Agriculture is world class and has for a long time been pushing the limits of agriculture.

Of course whether such intensive agriculture is actually a good idea is another matter; we've got quite some pollution issues here, and aren't exactly known for the tastiest produce.

I don't think this is a matter of merely re-shipping the same products. For example, if you look at poultry, the Netherlands imported 240 M€ worth of live poultry and exported 2300 M€.

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2021/25/the-netherlands-is-the...

This makes a lot more sense. In no universe can Netherlands compete with the output of the US and China.

The Netherlands are actually 237x smaller than the United States, not 50x smaller

ASML? (but that is not agricultural)

The explanation I have always been given is that we're quite large in very high value agricultural products such as flowers and that is what bumps up the export figures (measured in monetary value of the exports)

Big discussion in the Netherlands now, and going on to some extent for decades already, about: does it make sense for such a small country to have this much intensive agriculture?

As the article mentions, the nitrogen deposited in the little patches of what should pass for nature are killing it.

Nice to be self-sufficient in food, but we're more than that in some areas. But say something negative about farmers and you'll have protesters in big tractors blocking highways and city centers.

The parties currently trying to form a government will only let these problems fester and not make hard choices to put an end to them one way or another.

One of the four forming parties IS the farmers... They keep holding up these signs that say "no farmers no food", while we all know a huge part of it is for export.

Practically nobody is against the small farmers, which is the sad image they like to prop up, but there are plenty of them that drive around in a Tesla while their fully automated factory chomps through the never ending supply of animal carcasses.

>One of the four forming parties IS the farmers... They keep holding up these signs that say "no farmers no food", while we all know a huge part of it is for export.

Well, export or domestic, the "no food" part still stands.

> Well, export or domestic, the "no food" part still stands.

More & more I tend to regard Dutch farmland as a factory: one that happens to 'manufacture' agricultural products (mostly grass & maize to feed cows), using land as part of the machinery.

The "feed own population" is 2nd tier consideration. And as an industry, it uses a big % of the surface area in our densely populated country, while adding relatively little to our economy (~2% or so, iirc).

Now if land were plentiful that wouldn't be a (big) problem. But with agriculture taking the space of almost non-existant 'nature', all the environmental problems resulting from its intensity, animal welfare issues etc, this is a problem.

Dutch population is a bit 50/50 on this I'd say. Much sympathy for farmers but yes the problems are real. But farmers have a strong lobby here so probably not much will change. More automation, faster-growing crops, bigger farms, lower prices for what's produced, middlemen (like supermarket chains) squeeze them like crazy while raking in profits for their owners or shareholders.

Not a great time to be a farmer in the NL.

Edit: the high-tech agri & research stuff (as described in article), that is good stuff though.

> The "feed own population" is 2nd tier consideration. And as an industry, it uses a big % of the surface area in our densely populated country, while adding relatively little to our economy (~2% or so, iirc).

TFA says total agricultural exports in 2021 was $108.4 billion and according to Google the GDP was just over $1 trillion, which is closer to a tenth of the economy just in exports not 2%. Am I missing something?

https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2020/19/landbouw-droeg-in-20...

It’s only 1.4%. If you are generous you end up with at most 7% by adding in a lot of related industry and transportation of goods as well.

Then where does the $108 billion of exports come from? Even at 7% against 1 trillion gdp the math just doesn't make any sense to me if there’s that much in export.

Is most of the export capital just going towards importing fertilizer so it’s not counted towards GDP or something?

I have no idea of the specific numbers, but a component of GDP is indeed _net_ exports.

If you export 100B and import 100B the trade would account for 0% of the GDP.

At a glance, NL seem to import quite a lot of agricultural stuff, even if it exports more.

https://oec.world/en/profile/country/nld?yearlyTradeFlowSele...

It's also the EU country which uses the most ferts and pesticides. I wonder of there are any beekeepers left in NL, or bees for that matter. I've seen black bees in a reservation in Sicily. Amazing. I'd like to see them again in ten years.

Why do european farmers seem to have an aversion towards selling land? In the US it seems like farmers are always trying to cash out their land for a developer as soon as there is demand. Look at the farmland interface at most american cities and you can see active development on satellite views. Meanwhile over in amsterdam some of the most prime real estate not far from the central train station is still just farms. Seems to me they could stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars selling off these lots for development, then invest that money and make more than tight margin farming ever would have presumably.

You can't just sell land for development. If the land is zoned for argicultural use you can't just build a suburb there. Zoning doesn't end at city limits here. Every square meter of land has allowed uses assigned to it and changing it takes a long time with rounds of protests and consultations.

Zoning and protests over zoning exists in the US too. I wonder why the netherlands remain so restrictive however especially given a housing crisis and not as much of a need for agriculture land today as in centuries past.

It's a country where everything is very well organized. There are rules for everything and corruption is low.

One of the consequences is that it takes a long time and serious investments to get new construction projects going.

Another big reason is the CO2 crisis, which is partially caused by... Well, you know.

Why is France seeing these protests as well even though it has 12x the land?

No it does not. You could phase out more than 60% of the Dutch farmers, which would reclaim 40% of the land (from the 66% they currently use), losing less than 1% of the BDP, and the country would STILL have plenty of food.

>and the country would STILL have plenty of food

I did write: "export or domestic".

The country would still have "plenty of food", but the second largest production of food would be affected.

Affected, yes. That's not the same as "no food". Having farmers in the Netherlands is not a binary choice.

Which is not a very big production at all because most countries that don't qualify as failed states rightly organize their food production independently. The biggest buyer tends to be China who doesn't need the food to begin with, it's just buying on generational paranoia.

The argument being made is "farmers take care of our food! We need them!" That is what "no farmers no food" means: "no farmers, no food for us". Everyone understands that's what it means.

And that's just not true, as much of it is for export, as was mentioned.

> One of the four forming parties IS the farmers... They keep holding up these signs that say "no farmers no food", while we all know a huge part of it is for export.

Huge swathes of land in the Netherlands are used to grow flowers, which are definitely not food and are far from being critical for a society to subsist. They may be making fortunes selling them but let's not pretend the whole agricultural industry is mobilized to prevent famines.

I live in North Brabant, and around here, it mostly cows and maize/corn.

Somehow, some people think of this as 'nature' (it's indeed green, I guess), while the original would be heath lands on poor soils. Now, with all the nitrogen deposits, other species (nettles, grasses, prickly bramble bushes) that are less resilient to that come to flourish and take over the little heath lands that are left.

The implication that a "good" farmer should not be able to afford a car makes your statement about being pro-small farmers seem disingenuous. While I've read similar comments a few times recently, the "but" is always ridiculous. If a farmer manages to carve out enough free time to drive to the city to protest for a few days, surely he or she is a mega-rich, evil factory farmer, etc. - same story as the Canadian truckers a couple years ago. Not to be provocative, but I find it interesting that city-slicker posh leftist ecofascists somehow managed to convince themselves that working-class people such as farmers and truck drivers are part of the "privileged oppressor" category by virtue of protesting against policies that hurt them.

Calling it just "a car" seems disingenuous. My post mentioned a Tesla, which is a luxury expense the average Dutch person is not able to afford.

The whole point was to make a clear distinction between the working-class farmer and the mega-rich, evil factory farmer. The latter loves to act like they are the former.

I know a high school graduate who drives Uber part-time for a living and bought a brand-new Tesla with no downpayment recently (i.e. at elevated interest rates), so that's not a very good discriminator.

Anekdotal outlier. In 2022 there were 42,600 registered Tesla owners in the Netherlands. It's a luxury expense, no matter how you turn it.

Besides, it was just an illustrative way of saying "plenty of farmers are pretty well off". A bit silly to focus on that part of my argument instead of the actual point, which is that most Dutch people feel those big earners are the bigger problem.

Sure. But I've never seen any evidence that small farmers aren't aligned with the protests. Is there any, or are the wealthy farmers simply a convenient target?

Smaller farmers generally work hard for small margins. They are easily mobilized by the big agricultural companies that hide behind them.

Whatever measures are taken should, in my opinion at least, focus on the highly automated mass polluting bio industry and subsidize smaller, eco- and animal-friendly businesses instead.

The massive food surplus clearly leaves plenty of space to trim down a bit. The resulting CO2 decrease might even allow a few new houses to be built.

That's a completely different conversation from the broad condemnation of protests that affect all farmers based on the premise that farmers shouldn't be able to afford nice things.

It's a fair point, but, like other business owners (large or small), a farmer with a Tesla in the Netherlands is likely driving a company car and taking advantage of the tax incentives for company electric cars.

Forget about the car, many people have a company car and they're mostly EVs due to tax incentives.

The real story with the farmers is that there are 3 very large farming companies responsible for more emissions than all traffic in the country combined. That's close to 10x more emissions than the whole aviation industry. These are billion euro+ sized businesses, with a huge environmental impact. They pay PR firms to paint these "small farmer" stories while they're just large industrial polluters.

The main person for the political "farmers party" has a long history of being deeply involved with these companies. She's basically their lobbyist.

Example: Van Drie Group, over 3 billion revenue last year from veal. In Dutch, but a bit more background here: https://www.groene.nl/artikel/het-merk-boer

> But say something negative about farmers and you'll have protesters in big tractors blocking highways and city centers.

At this point they should be called what they are: agricultural corporations.

How much taxes are these companies bringing in?

Given that farming in general is about 1-2% of GDP and farmers get a lot of subsidies (about 25% of the EU budget), I'd say not too much. But I don't have exact numbers here.

They're pretty taxing on the land though. But those externalities are not priced in.

There is often similar discussion in California, who produces much of the country's agriculture, but uses huge amounts of natural resources to do so (particularly water).

I don't know if the ecological cost of such a model, and by extension the model itslef, is anything to be proud of.

The nitrogen effects killing what is left over of nature is something that has been documented since the 80s already. Things have only changed for the worst since then.

Walk around through some greenhouse area in South Holland, or through some flower fields in North Holland, and the chemical smells in the air will give you a headache. I don't understand how people can live there. And I'm surprised they don't see an explosion of cancer rates locally.

No one wants to unsettle such a gret export balance, especially now with the farmer's party maybe joining the government.

So I guess the water tomatoes and the plofkippen are here to stay.

My cousin works as a farmer's hand in the Netherlands. He had an interesting anecdote about liquid manure. They used to spray it over the land, but people living nearby started complaining about the smell, so they started injected it underground. They found that yields improved after that.

They stored the liquid manure in a big bag. I stood on it, it was a bit like a water bed.

> They stored the liquid manure in a big bag. I stood on it

I am certain its a sturdy bag but why risk it?

That would make an even greater story. "Let me tell you kids about the time I had to swim through a literal pool of shit."

That actually does happen. Industrial pig and chicken farms often have manure lagoons, which are exactly what they sound like. Do not do an image search for manure lagoons. There's been quite a few instances of people falling in and being overcome by fumes. I'm sure there are worse ways to go, but not many of them.

I would imagine that if people are overcome by fumes, they lose consciousness quite quickly. So in spite of the unpleasant imagery it might not be too bad and I can think of quite a few worse ways to go.

What we need is some data; has anyone done a poll to measure people's satisfaction with their manner of death?

I think manure here is used (not incorrectly, but uncommonly) to mean fertiliser but not perhaps animal excrement.

Oh no, it really does mean animal excrement here

Unless you're thijson's cousin, you can't really say that can you.

Having grown up in the rural Netherlands in the 90s: Yes, it was animal excrement and it was terrible. You’d had to close your windows even if a farmer was spraying their manure a kilometer away. Not to mention that these tanks of manure would be driven through towns and would leave behind liquid spills on the roads.

Direct injection was a godsend.

My dad had one of those, one of many stories he told with the implicit "don't be an idiot like your dad" moral. Every parent should have a few!

Eh, once you've been covered in shit enough times, the risk of once more is easily outweighed by a novel experience.

It's not done for the smell but for less NOx pollution. It's the law and the fines are massive.

Fun fact:

In open fields in Spain you can harvest around 4 kilograms of tomatoes per square metre. A Dutch high-tech greenhouse produces 80 kilograms per square metre and with four times less water.

How much more energy spent though?

Also how do they taste? My recollection of Dutch tomatoes is they they are not very good. Bland, watery.

Generally in agriculture (and other domains too) when you maximize output the quality suffers. And tomatoes are no exception. Growing your own or finding a small hobby grower and greatly appreciating their efforts are your best bets for having actual tasty stuff. Tomatoes are no longer true luxury food but tasty tomatoes are.

Well... (if I am calculating correctly)

A tomato plant is roughly ~40lbs/sqft/year (hydroponic... at 40W/sqft). That's a bit higher than the 80kg/m^2 estimate, but I don't have the wattage requirements for the lower yield. But, assuming it is linear, about 20Wh/g-tomato.

And then, from a climate impact standpoint... The marginal CO2 emissions factor in the Netherlands is pretty high at ~0.6kg/kWh, so ~2kg-CO2 for every (~6oz) tomato. That is about 200-300x higher than the CO2 from trucking (refrigerated) tomatoes from Spain to Netherlands (~30-40kg-CO2/ton-tomato/1000 miles ~= 7g-CO2/tomato).

The local ecological (water+fertilizer+pesticide) impact is probably higher in Spain (vs the greenhouse construction and land use in the Netherlands), though it is hard to know how much to trade that off.

Vaclav Smil had some interesting calculations on tomatoes too - in his book 'How the World really works'.

(link not from the book, but very similar) https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Tomatoes-I...

Do the Dutch ones end up tasting less like water or are they still just as crap as anything not from a garden? Sort of joking sort of not, mass produced tomatoes end up tasting like nothing most of the time

Our Dutch tomatoes have no taste.

To be fair do tomatos in Spanish supermarkets taste much better?

No. They might even be imported from Holland.

Depends where. As you travel towards the south of the country or to the Canary Islands, tomatoes have a stronger tomato flavour.

Serious answer: it entirely depends on the variety of tomatoes being grown. There are some varieties that have been selected for taste. Typically, they will also have a very efficient supply chain with a super short duration between harvest to packaging to supermarket (packaging at the greenhouse, straight to distribution, to retail). They are typically about three times the price of the cheapest 'bulk' tomatoes (and also have a higher margin, in the end).

The main challenge with fruits, and especially tomatoes, is ripening versus shelf life. A tomato tastes best when it's as ripe as possible. Sweet, fragrant and full of flavor. However, at that very special time, it will burst on the vine or fall apart in your fruit basket within a day. Which is why you'll never find this quality in a supermarket. And why I grow tomatoes in my garden every summer :)

Great answer. I honestly love a great tomato, it can make 5th place burger #1, and I can eat it like an apple no problem, but it's tricky to get in the city.

Indeterminate tomatos constantly produce too and if you don’t have frost you can just keep it going.

Since there was such an emphasis on quantity, the Dutch tomatoes became known in the 80s as Wasserbomben in Germany. Taste has become more of a priority after we saw exports diminish. If you’re really interested: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/...

Cool, thanks for the link. I didn't know there was any aspect of that phenomenon specific to the Netherlands, since I'm in Canada and everything at the shops is the same.

Let's just say that they are a perfect match for the Dutch palate..

They are notorious around Europe for being mostly tasteless, but I think it's changing a bit. Many supermarkets here now often have "luxury" tomatoes that try to compete on taste. For example try the "Tasty Tom" variety when you can find it, it actually tastes pretty good despite being a hydroponic greenhouse tomatoe.

And the dutch ones might as well be bags of water.

Well, you see, water is cheap. Heat is not..

Less fun fact: Netherlands is only second to Belgium when it comes to PFAS contamination in fruit produce exports in Europe. 27% contamination on average.

I am a novice Spanish tomato grower, I planted tomatoes in my 2 square meters raised bed last summer. It gave me more than 4 kilograms, and I did many things wrong.

This is obviously just anecdotal, but your numbers for Spain might be too low.

To the extent that the greenhouses are a significant source of light pollution, and every once in a while (faulty coverings, or for a holiday) the sky will be bright purple[1,2]

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Netherlands/comments/10mc6ah/can_an... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rotterdam/comments/ylmcgy/bright_pu...

Big discussion in the Netherlands now, and going on to some extent for decades already, about: does it make sense for such a small country to have this much intensive agriculture?

As the article mentions, the nitrogen deposited in the little patches of what should pass for nature are killing it.

Nice to be self-sufficient in food, but we're more than that in some areas. But say something negative about farmers and you'll have protesters in big tractors blocking highways and city centers.

The parties currently trying to form a government will only let these problems fester and not make hard choices to put an end to them one way or another.

[^duplicate comment] @dang

Does the "@" really do anything "special" though?

The Netherlands is a good example of intensive agriculture: not only have they put heavy capital investments into the land they already had, they even invested substantial amounts of capital in creating new land.

If you'd asked me which country was the 2nd largest exporter of agricultural products, I certainly wouldn't have said the Netherlands. It's cool to see what they're doing to maximize efficiency, and I hope that efficiency can be replicated globally as well.

That efficiency has huge externalities and I hope it will not be replicated globally.

It’s completely destroying our nature, air, water and soil. So no, it should decubitus be replicated.

No, this is not an efficiency you want to replicate elsewhere. It come at huge costs, monetary and ecological. This is a model pushed to the level of absurdity.

Yeah well.

Those things grow the quickest because they were cultivated to absorb the most water.

So there's little taste and advantages with those, compared to others.

So yeah, great. But numbers only say part of the story.

So they're like broiler chicken? I'm always impressed by US chicken breasts until it goes in my mouth.

The bummer is how much of it driven by fossil fuels: greenhouses heated with gas, air pumped with CO2 to speed up ripening, fertilizer made from fossil fuels.

very poor quality though, if you've had dutch tomatoes or peppers, you'll know

I'd be interested in the nutritional value of said products as well

Yep, the tomatoes coming from Spain, Italy, etc have a lot more flavor. NL is more like the Shenzhen of agriculture (not saying it like it's a bad thing)

There is nothing like driving from the Netherlands to Germany, going to the Supermarkt and buying cucumbers branded Origin Netherlands at 60% of their price in the Netherlands...

https://northerntimes.nl/dutch-shoppers-flock-to-german-supe...

Germany is the black hole of supermarket prices. Even shit made in Austria is cheaper once you cross the border to Germany than in the country where it's made. It's insane.

The single market at work, and such a small amount of a product's cost is from making it. I am always sad about not being near an internal EU border for this reason. (though, if my time were worthless, I'd probably come out ahead buying plane tickets)

I lived near an internal EU border and I can confirm - you can get the best of two countries ! I guess over time the differences in EU should diminish, but it will take decades.

Not disagreeing here, but how I understand it, the year-round availability of fresh produce is a quality trade-off.

though Tomatos can be bought in cans with lots of better taste

But they look incredible on the shelves!

A uniform color and consistent geometric shape is all that matters. Taste is redundant. Carrots are orange because the Dutch bred them that way.

Taste is more than redundant. It's is a temptation towards gluttony. You wouldn't want your food tempting you to sin, would you?

Oh my God, does this explain Dutch cuisine?

I thought Dutch cuisine was explained by the former use of calories to substitute for lack of cheap central heating; considering the thickness of the table "cloths", even the furniture must be freezing in winter?

(mmmm... rijsttafel... must. avoid. temptation.)

Huh I had not made that connection between the food and central heating. Maybe this is why every cold draft feels like an admonition to keep active. Wouldn't want to be slothful...

Regardless, the heating situation has fostered an outstanding coffee culture completely at odds with the cuisine.

Yeah it's because in Holland they grow them in cotton buds sprayed with nutrients. It minimises the chance of plant diseases and it's much easier to harvest but it loses taste. The Germans call the Dutch tomatoes Wasserbomben. Meaning water bombs.

Well they say what tastes good goes to France. What looks good goes to Germany.

Germany, to me, seems like the most mimetic food culture there is. In general, it’s all appearance, no substance.

Slightly related, the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam has an interesting exhibit looking at global agriculture trade (which the Netherlands plays a large role in).

https://www.hetscheepvaartmuseum.com/whats-on/exhibitions/fo...

It's also one of the largest importers/re-exporters.

Here’s a chart that shows how the two compare: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/10/dutch-agricultural-exp... (cbs is the government bureau for statistics)

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