So because some people are shitting in their kitchen, it isn't a bad idea to do so as well?

On a more serious note though, much of the agriculture in the Netherlands is the production of meat, especially pork, for export. This is by far the biggest source of pollution. I'd rather live with less animal farmers and more Natura2000 areas than the other way around.

Well, if us Dutch people stop shitting in our kitchen, we import food from other countries shitting in their kitchen, plus we now have extra fuel to burn to get the food here.

We are the biggest exporter of agricultural products after the US, which is insane given the size of our country:

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2019/01/18/neder...

There is no need to import food, we could just start exporting less.

> There is no need to import food, we could just start exporting less.

Are you going to pay the unemployment salary for the people who currently work in the agricultural sector?

Only by value. We specialized in expensive produce.

Actually, Dutch export most of their food and turn around and import cheaper food from far away (Spain and Brazil being two common sources).

Check it out at the grocery store sometime. It's not so easy to find the nice Dutch produce (the Germans are enjoying it!)

Italian immigrant here: let me tell you something. NL may cultivate and export the most mass of agricultural products, but there’s nothing the lit greenhouses you see taking off from Schiphol can do to best the sun scorching the skin of a tomato growing in Puglia. The metabolism it has to crank up 200% to defend against such constant environmental aggression is something irrepetable you can smell and taste.

This is the reason I've stopped buying red peppers in the summer when the local super market starts importing them from Netherlands. In the winter, they import them from Spain. The quality difference is staggering.

My own country is also great at mass producing poor quality food in the sense of taste - in other terms of look, feel and uniformity it's great.

I'm not convinced they couldn't produce great taste in Netherlands, though, if they put their mind to it. I think it's more of a bug in the market mechanisms. But it's depressing for sure. I root for the day small-scale shipping is automated and solved for good, and then I can be the one deciding who I'm buying peppers from.

> It's not so easy to find the nice Dutch produce (the Germans are enjoying it!)

Wait, is Dutch produce supposed to be nice? I know that in Germany, Dutch tomatoes are disparaged as "Wasserbomben", and in Romania the Dutch vegetables are the cheap supermarket stuff that you buy if you don’t a chance to pass by the marketplace and buy something locally grown.

Dutch greenhouses are in fact capable of producing "Wasserbomben" as well as quality produce -- at a higher price point. Unfortunately, supermarkets in most parts of the world have decided they prefer the former.

Do you agree that your analogy is very very far fetched?

If the analogy would hold up just a little bit, all this nature already would have perished, right?

This is about the subtle opinion of some green leaning people who think it is not the 'right' nature which is growing in the Natura2000 areas right know.

Nothing catastrophic, just a purely intellectual debate.

Well there are many important differences between plants and animals so... sounds like they have a reasonable basis for concern.

The problem in the Netherlands is that the Natura2000 areas are too small. So any activity next to such areas immediately affects rare species.

The other problem is that the government, in cooperation with many sectors, has created paper realities. One by one, those realities go down when people start measuring and then a sector is in trouble.

It looks to me like Germany has a significant amount of Natura 2000 sites, rather in proportion to NL in terms of land size. However, Germany has triple the percentage of forest compare to NL. Germany also has a lot of manufacturing that NL doesn't have. Both use about 50% of their land for agriculture.

From what I can gather, Dutch farming is higher output - production wise as well as emissions wise.

How does this explain 2 orders of a magnitude difference in allowed nitrogen disposition compared to Germany?

NL has less biomass to absorb it - less forest and less soil.

There is basically less material for the pollutants to disperse.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...