The capital density per square foot is 4 to 5 times orders of magnitude higher than agriculture, to suggest the two compete for land use is utterly ridiculous.

Agriculture competes with urbanization and it will always lose, as it should, because it's not an inherently superior or moral use of land: most of agriculture are ecologically disastrous monocultures drenched in herbicides and fertilizers. A corn field is not a bucolic utopia, but a carefully managed anthropic environment where nature was all but banished for the economic welfare of the rural population.

In the EU they use substantially less pesticides and fertilizers than we do in the US, and have as good or better yields.

Dutch agriculture is anything but a bucolic idyl, instead consisting of very large industrial operations owned by an ever decreasing number of companies that produce vast amounts of food for export using imported feed and plowing the manure that remains, truly stupendous amounts, into the soil thereby rendering it effectively dead.

Large tracts of the province of Drente, formerly poor and backward and hence, in a way, pretty, have been taken over by lily plantations (yes, the flower) that are absolutely drenched in pesticides.

Most food crops are grown in enormous greenhouses that take monstrous amounts of energy to heat and that are lit up 24 hours a day to increase yields, making it difficult for people in surrounding villages to sleep. They are automated as much as possible and the work that can not be automated is done by underpaid immigrant workers living in horrible conditions.

So, yes, Dutch agriculture has “as good or better yields”, but it’s still ecologically disastrous.

And gas prices are more or less back to where they were before the invasion.

Easy for you to say when you have a full stomach. See what happened in countries that disregard their farmers or agricultural sectors. Food price soared, and social unrest set in leading to crime, anarchy and governments collapsing.

People need to eat, simple. Hungry people will eventually turn to crime to survive, including the people paid form your taxes to protect you (police, military, etc)

So, focus on protecting species that do well in nitrogen poor areas in the areas that are actually nitrogen poor.

If we move production around to average everything out we’ll end up with a more homogeneous Europe, less production and less biodiversity.

I don’t know if you know your history, but farmers do.

This is nothing to do with Netherlands’ own food self-sufficiency.

The counterpoint here is what gross tonnage per annum does the population of the Netherlands consume .. and in the event of supply chain disruptions, should (say) NATO hiccup, to what degree are they self sufficient?

Farming and urban land uses aren't a straight either|or, they're a complex need both.

eg: In a pinch meat animals can be slaughtered and eaten and what they once ate can be fed instead to humans.

It's the insurance of being not far removed from near sufficiency.

Basically, it's a lifestyle and politico-economic choice, not a need.

The answer lies between your initial zero and your over dramatic 3x imaginary ball of dung.

If your government is sensible and transparent I'm sure there are public domain white papers that cover their discussions and recommendations which might make for an interesting read and put an end to this silly posturing.

Where? You are just expressing a political preference and hand-waving to unnamed experts. By all accounts, Europe is overproducing agricultural products and the large part of EU's policies are aimed at limiting this surplus.

This is such a woke/leftist, detached-from-reality take I'm not sure where to start.

Using land for housing or (data center for that matter) is just more efficient most of the time.

How is that a sensible comparison? Are you suggesting that if they spread out servers over a large enough area that would improve this somehow? Like let’s place a rack per every hectare of wheat..

> they don’t have many employees.

Yes. The definition of efficiency.

Then again modern agricultural is very not labour intense either, just much less efficient space wise.

Are you saying that data centres are more efficient "space wise" at producing food?

Perhaps you're looking for a better comparison.

No. They are several magnitudes more efficient at ‘producing’ money. Something you can use to buy food grown somewhere else where land is cheaper or is less desirable for urban or industrial developments.

> Perhaps you're looking for a better comparison.

Not really.

I have decades of background in agriculture, mining, energy, geophysical exploration, math consulting and public policy (not the Netherlands) .. money is great up to a point .. but like gold you can't eat it and having actual assets that are useful is something handy to keep in the back pocket.

Data centers are in fact so space efficient that it’s unlikely that covering even a couple percent of an entire country would ever make economical sense. Well maybe unless that country is Liechtenstein and we want to move all the world’s servers there for some reason.

> money is great up to a point .. but like gold you can't eat it and having actual assets that are useful is something handy to keep in the back pocket.

You are clearly right. However I might be wrong but I still believe that it could hypothetically be possibly to convert a small proportion of farmland into data centers in certain areas without causing global food shortages.

Open land is hardly a thing (unless it’s a park or a nature reserve) in most of the Netherlands. The country is very densely populated. If you exclude the northern provinces (Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe) the rest of the country is about as dense as some of the more spread out major cities in the US.

> favor reserving some open land just in case the country ever needs to rely on agriculture

Probably unnecessary if it’s a small country inside the EU.

However this is an absurd question to ask when talking about the Netherlands specifically. It’s the second biggest exporter of agricultural goods (in $ not tonnage) in the world after the US despite having several magnitudes less space and being over 10x more densely populated).

It’s probably the country which is the least likely to run out of food. Of course the food grown there is very energy intense but since it also exports more natural gas than any other country in the EU that shouldn’t be a huge issue..

Of course there are some very rational reasons for that.

Dutch farmers are probably the most privileged group in the country and they are fighting tooth and nail to preserve that status no matter the cost.

Anything they say or complain about should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Among other things, their influence on the water management policy has an effect of private homes literally sinking in certain parts of the country.

Agro-industry in the Netherlands is unsustainable and all the parties involved know it. Whatever they say, what we're watching here is just the buyout negotiations.

Also, farmers don’t have to disappear for more housing. It seems the government does a great job pitting a lot of its citizens against farmers by lying that they are holding back new housing development, while the real issue is a lack of builders, too stringent guidelines and a lack of building materials.

Saying that any result of hard work is a privilege makes me puke. You know literally nothing about this life. And you should stop commenting on it.

And unlike you, farming families invested almost everything they made back into the farm, for their children, in order to see it continue. And the children (like me) who don’t continue on that farm all have to agree that a large part of their inheritance is gifted to the brother or sister who does. That’s something you only see in well run family companies. The entire family wants to see it succeed.

That’s one reason why the BBB got a lot more votes anyone expected. Nearly everyone in NL is related to a farming family and they have gathered a lot of sympathy because arrogant unsympathetic politicians and citydwellers are bashing their heritage and preying on their land.

That is quite an arrogant claim, sir. You know not me, nor which words or contexts I consumed.

That’s the only option left on the table if they won’t shrink the livestock and diversify as farmers.

Let’s be real: it’s not like this legislation came out of the blue. Nitrogen deposition as a problem is something the sector has known about for a while. Instead of diversifying away from nitrogen emission these companies chose to double down on nitrogen washing technology. Turns out that technology doesn’t work.

Intensive livestock in the way it’s happening now doesn’t have a future in the Netherlands. I’d like to go even further and say that it makes a poor investment anywhere in the world.

Farmers are entrepreneurs. Being an entrepreneur means managing risks and they did that pretty poorly as a sector.

A lot of farmers invited the risk and harvested its profits. Had they diversified they would have been in much better shape.

You can’t eat your cake and have it..

Of course these products that are consumed would have to be produced somewhere else, but since the pollution (nitrogen) is a local problem, this would still be a net win, and not just moving the problem around.

Amazing! Good for them. One would think such agricultural and engineering powerhouse could solve the nitrogen problem with technology and not resort to destroying one of it's most innovative industries.

>>They can severely reduce farming without endangering domestic food supplies.

That's probably what the Germans thought when they closed their nuclear power plants. And then the invasion of Ukraine happened.

>>Of course these products that are consumed would have to be produced somewhere else, but since the pollution (nitrogen) is a local problem, this would still be a net win, and not just moving the problem around.

TIL: polluting some other third world country, with severe lack of environment standards and inefficient agriculture is called a net win.

For those who have read Asterix there is this scene in 'The Great Crossing' [1] where the fish monger - Kostunrix in the Dutch version, Unhygienix in the UK, Epidemix in the US - asks what the sea has to do with his fish since he gets it 'fresh from Lutetia' (Paris).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix_and_the_Great_Crossing

Why are the Dutch angry with EU and Microsoft and not with their elected Dutch government officials who set up these legal tax dodging opportunities to attract such corporations in the first place?

They made the rules, Microsoft (and other companies) are just following them.

It’s no great secret than corporations are generally profit seeking and will try to utilize any “legal loophole” they can find. It would not be reasonable to expect them not to when the system they operate in strongly incentivize them to prioritize profit over anything else. I mean “nice corporations” will simply be outcompeted by the ruthless ones…

The Netherlands has a self inflicted nitrogen crisis mainly due to intensive farming. Despite being a small country, it's one of the largest food exporters in the world. E.g. it is the world's leading exporter of tomatoes. But most of those are grown in green houses. The real problem is cattle. Cows, chickens, & pigs. Intensive cattle farming is causing loads of issues with manure and the go to solution is just fertilizing grass fields, which results in a lot of emissions and poisons the water and atmosphere. To the point where it's having health impacts. The only way out is to downsize that sector. Which is of course unpopular with farmers.

EU regulations related to nitrogen emissions are causing a need to do something about emissions. One of the results of this has been to reduce speeds on highways to 100km/h (ICE cars emit lots of nitrogen). This was done by a right leaning conservative government lead by a party that actually bumped the speed limit to 130km/h a few years before that. Additionally, until they get emissions down, a lot of construction projects along highways are blocked. And of course the government is under a lot of pressure to do something about the biggest emitters next: farmers.

So, farmers don't like this and recent election rounds resulted in a victory for a new pro-farmer party. Farmers have been protesting regularly for years and of course they are not too excited about MS and others converting their farm land into data centers while finding a way around the rules against new construction. That's not because they hate MS but because they are against the whole system of rules that is putting them out of business while companies like MS get to profit and the same government that's coming after them looks the other way.