> in favor of covering the entire country in data centres
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..