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.
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.
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?
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.
Is most of the export capital just going towards importing fertilizer so it’s not counted towards GDP or something?
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...
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.
I did write: "export or domestic".
The country would still have "plenty of food", but the second largest production of food would be affected.
And that's just not true, as much of it is for export, as was mentioned.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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