The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
nationalgeographic.com
The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
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Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
#2Can we put "(Netherlands)" after the word "country" to overcome the clickbait title?
Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
#3Coming in from a country (India) which even today has a large agricultural community which still uses ancient tools for farming (tractors are pretty much the most many get up to, with proper cold storage facilities, greenhouses etc practically a pipe dream), looking at countries improve their techniques in such a manner makes me wonder what it will take to move my country to similar scale. Is it simply technical, or is there a major push by government involved? Is it the community embracing technology, or is it other factors which make farming unsustainable without technology? Is it simply that farmers in these countries are overall more well to do? Or is it a combination of all of this?
Especially in India, farmers have been moved even to suicide [1] during times of drought and flood, which seems to come up every other year (and farming is a very climate sensitive field anyway), I really wonder how tech can work to improve the status quo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India
Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
#4Coming in from a country (India) which even today has a large agricultural community which still uses ancient tools for farming (tractors are pretty much the most many get up to, with proper cold storage facilities, greenhouses etc practically a pipe dream), looking at countries improve their techniques in such a manner makes me wonder what it will take to move my country to similar scale. Is it simply technical, or…
I only scrolled through TFA (added to read later list). I am Dutch though.
A lot of these systems require enormous (and growing) up-front investments, not feasible for small independent operations. There are a lot of family business in Westland, but they require massive mortgages and/or loans to keep up with the times (and the investments that they require). There are fewer and fewer small farms and more and more 'mega-barns'.
Little space is needed, but a lot of it is high carbon and high capital.
Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
#5Coming in from a country (India) which even today has a large agricultural community which still uses ancient tools for farming (tractors are pretty much the most many get up to, with proper cold storage facilities, greenhouses etc practically a pipe dream), looking at countries improve their techniques in such a manner makes me wonder what it will take to move my country to similar scale. Is it simply technical, or…
The answers are simple to pose, difficult to even consider implementing, and troublesome in general. The problem in general is that we need more resources, or fewer people, but most rational people recognize the pitfalls in pursuing a "solution" to the latter, the and the former requires innovation or luck.
Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
#6I'm afraid Netherlands is only good for food that's over-engineered, cardboard-tasting and geneticaly modified for quantity. But that's future I guess.
Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
#7Can we put "(Netherlands)" after the word "country" to overcome the clickbait title?
As a Dutchman I had no idea it was going to be about us. We feeding the world? Mkay, that's new. Anyway, +1 on making it less clickbait.
Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
#8Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
#9Can we put "(Netherlands)" after the word "country" to overcome the clickbait title?
Certainly, we've updated the title from “This Tiny Country Feeds the World” to a representative phrase from the subtitle.
Re: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant
#10Here in the UK, tomatoes from the Netherlands are the most common sold in British supermarkets.
Unfortunately, they are quite flavourless. The type of tomato (and price) makes no difference (organic, vine-ripened, salad). Most of them are usually semi-ripe. Even if you allow them to ripen at home for a few days, they are still quite tasteless.
Presumably, Italy keeps its best tomato produce for themselves and I don't blame them (although Italian tinned tomatoes are widely available in the UK, just not the fresh variety).