- Re: Grayzone: Dutch farmers battle technocratic forces driving them into oblivion Archived Message
Posted by John Monro
on December 10, 2022, 6:13 am, in reply to "Grayzone: Dutch farmers battle technocratic forces driving them into oblivion"
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Interesting article, with a politically loaded heading "driving Dutch farmers into oblivion" and a politically slanted article. I found it quite difficult to follow too, Here's another take on the Dutch agricultural crisis https://atlanticsentinel.com/2022/06/the-netherlands-farm-crisis-explained/ which I think is a bit easier to follow, Written by a Dutch politician, Nick Ottens of the The People's Party for Freedom and Democracy or in (Dutch: Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie it seems to have a more neutral and studied stance. Even so, the problems are manifold. Here is NZ we have the same sort of problem, not quite so much with the same level of stock intensity as in Holland, these are our figures Between 1990 and 2019: dairy cattle numbers increased by 82 percent nationally from 3.4 million to 6.3 million Canterbury dairy cattle increased tenfold (973 percent) from 113,000 to 1.2 million Southland dairy cattle increased sixteen-fold (1,584 percent) from 38,000 to 636,000 beef cattle decreased by 15.3 percent nationally from 4.6 million to 3.9 million sheep decreased by 53.6 percent nationally from 57.9 million to 26.8 million. Dairy in particular is a very polluting activity - and note the increase in dairy cow numbers. The population of NZ is about 5 million, the waste in urine and faeces of our 6 million cows is equivalent of human waste from a population of 60 million - methane emissions account for a full half of the global warming gas potential of the country. Also affecting waterways, high nitrate levels in drinking water etc. Canterbury is a particularly egregious example because the soils are shallow and loose, and waste percolates easily in to the water table and Christchurch's drinking water. In addition as one of the driest areas in the country, huge levels of irrigation are required to grow the grass the cows eat, while two million tonnes of palm oil kernel are imported from places like indonesia, whereas twenty years ago no imported feed was required at all, Until 30 years ago, Canturbury plain farming was arable or sheep. Dairy conversion funded by agribusiness and investment vehicles national and international, should never have been allowed ,everyone with any knowledge of local conditions there would have anticipated the problems. but of course no-one is going to voluntarily or compulsorily wish to see that misapplied investment be given up. We don't have cows in sheds but high fertiliser use, irrigation and imported feed have increased stocking rates on the land to unsustainable levels. NZ fixes the problem, for the most part, by ignoring it, and any effort by our present Labour administration its actually do something about accounting for farming methane emission is massively opposed by the farming lobby and the investors who back them. , |