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The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant

334 points by deegles 9y ago

lucideer 9y ago
Can we put "(Netherlands)" after the word "country" to overcome the clickbait title?
- lucb1e 9y ago
  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.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    I'd go for "Netherlands feeds the world, despite its size."
- sctb 9y ago
  Certainly, we've updated the title from “This Tiny Country Feeds the World” to a representative phrase from the subtitle.
madmax108 9y ago
Coming 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India
- bbvnvlt 9y ago
  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.
  - WJW 9y ago
    Also needed is a very stable environment, but infrastructurally and politically. A lot of these investments would never be feasible without for example the stability of the electricity network or the road network. It can be argued if this is caused by the government, but the Dutch seem more maintenance-minded than most other countries I visited. Probably caused by all the dikes: if not maintaining something properly will kill your entire village, you have a lot of incentive to become very good at it.
    - bbvnvlt 9y ago
      We have, in fact, a dedicated form of local government for water management [1], and: > These regional water authorities are among the oldest forms of local government in the Netherlands, some of them having been founded in the 13th century. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    To add to your point about economies of scale, Indian farmers are a reliable political bloc. Turning a million unproductive farmers into 10,000 highly-productive ones is, from a political perspective, disastrous if you rely on that bloc. It's a similar phenomenon to public union political capture in certain American cities.
  - pakitan 9y ago
    Yeah, I was wondering about that. Some of those farms look like they have million(s) dollars worth of equipment and infrastructure. And farming isn't exactly a high-margin industry so starting a new farm must be quite a risky venture. Are there government programs that help with the financing or it's all private capital?
Soviet 9y ago
I'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.
- harigov 9y ago
  It will probably improve as time goes by.
  - gumby 9y ago
    As long as there's an incentive for it to get better. Based on my experience in the US the incentives run the other way :-(. All about cost.
- tchaffee 9y ago
  The article said the country produces no GMOs. Regular size tomatoes can be lacking in flavor. But I find the small tomatoes from there delicious. Some other vegetables like peppers are pretty tasty too. It's not all bad.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  I think GMO tomatoes have not been commercially grown anywhere in the world since the 1990's, at least not on any meaningful scale.
cirrus-clouds 9y ago
Here 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).
- jules 9y ago
  There are flavourful varieties such as Tasty Tom or small plum tomatoes, but they are much more expensive at €10 per kg versus €2 per kg for a basic variety and less than €1 per kg for the most tasteless variety.
  - tirant 9y ago
    Even Tasty Tom or small plum from AH are terrible compared what you can get locally in Spain or Italy to give an example.
- johansch 9y ago
  In Sweden we tend to get e.g. tomatoes from the Netherlands, Spain and Morocco. From a consumer perspective it seems random - the price doesn't really factor in at all. Tomatoes from the Netherlands are almost always tasteless. Tomatoes from Spain are often tasty, but sometimes tasteless. Tomatoes from Morocco are sometimes tasteless and sometimes horrible. So I look for Tomatoes grown in Spain and wish for the best...
  - ardit33 9y ago
    Italian, or Albanian tomatoes are the best. You guys live so up-north, that it takes a long time for tomatoes to get there so you are most likely going to get shipped the 1. Tasteless type, that happens to resist longer on shelves, or 2. Unripped tomatoes that get ripened on the way there. There is a huge difference in taste between in vine ripped tomatoes and the one they are picked up still green. The northeast US has the same problem. Tomatoes in California are usually pretty good, tomatoes in Boston taste like crap. (the joke is that Boston is the last stop for a tomato truck, before they get thrown in the ocean as trash).
thriftwy 9y ago
There will be 10 billion people on Earth. Growing food for them needs a tiny area in highly developed countries via industrial farming. But what would that 10bn people do then?
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  Are you seriously asking what productive work people can do other than farming?
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    I'm seriously asking what productive work can billions of people from underdeveloped and unstable countries do. Without access to lucrative markets, too.
    - forkLding 9y ago
      Move from primary to secondary and then tertiary or just jump to tertiary or even reach quanternary sector Talking about three sector theory
      - imtringued 9y ago
        I think the parent implies that automation and lack of capital to invest into automation will make those sectors inaccessible to untrained and unskilled people in developing countries. Usually inequality between countries or people is reduced by rich and poor trading with each other. But what if the poor have nothing to offer to the rich? Then the only option is to work for their own sustenance which means farming.
        thriftwy 9y ago
        There's this saying about comparative advantage. But what happens when poor country doesn't have any comparative advantages over rich country? Or a few really tiny and disgusting ones which definitely won't support hundreds of millions people?
novalis78 9y ago
Makes me wonder how much of this could be replicated and what it would yield in states (Florida) with amazing sunshine and access to fresh water and cheap power.
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > in states (Florida) with amazing sunshine and access to fresh water and cheap power. Actually the model would work better in states with less arable land or with a colder climate. Reasons: 1. Better food security, less reliance on imported food 2. As the article states, water use is much lower than open field farming, so it's better for places with constrained resources 3. More environmental if the food is grown closer to the consumers as there's less need for storage and transport. Similar to #1 4. Sunshine doesn't really matter for these greenhouses since a lot of them are using LED lights tuned to the species they're growing to increase output. [0] [0] https://www.verticalfarmingconference.com/indoor-farming/japans-panasonic-moves-vertical-farming-singapore/ https://www.verticalfarmingconference.com/indoor-farming/jap...
hownottowrite 9y ago
The Dutch are also one of the largest landholders in the US with 4.8 million acres of farmland.[0] [0] https://www.agdaily.com/insights/not-just-u-s-farmland-foreign-held-whats-intentions/ https://www.agdaily.com/insights/not-just-u-s-farmland-forei...
gumby 9y ago
Quite interesting that the Duijvestijns facility is allegedly close to fertilizer and energy self-sufficient. What about the economics?
linuxorgasms 9y ago
I make my own tomatoes ,and i make them damn good. screw them capitalist grocery stores :D
tpeo 9y ago
I think that how much a country is "feeding the world" would be more properly measured in metric tons, rather than dollars. So saying that the Netherlands are "feeding the world" on account of the total value of their agricultural exports seems to me a bit misleading. Staples are cheap.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  This is actually where the story gets really interesting. NL is producing an incredible amount of tonnage for such a small country. The division between lower grade (tasting poorly) vegetables and more tasty quality stuff (which is far more expensive) is severely lopsided (towards the poorer tasting variety). Because vegetables are mostly water by weight quite a lot of produce leaves the country in freeze dried form to save on shipping.
spiderfarmer 9y ago
I am from the Netherlands and I have to say that regretably a large part of our country thinks that our farmers are incompetent, stupid, nature-hating animal bashers because of how the media treats them. It's gross how strong the lobby is against our farmers, even though they're clearly among the most competent, intelligent, sustainable farmers around the world. They always use cherry-picked facts (and even blatant lies), decades old photo and video materials and examples from foreign farms against our farmers, in order to put pressure on the government to regulate our farmers even more, to the point where our farmers feel that they are nothing more than underpaid workers for a huge governmental organization.
- mverwijs 9y ago
  From the article: " This high-tech broiler house holds up to 150,000 birds, from hatching to harvesting" No 'decades old photo' either. I find it hard to believe someone loving live animals would put them in such a place.
  - spiderfarmer 9y ago
    These 150.000 birds are getting much better care from this single farmer than when they were spread over 10.000 households like they were 100 years ago.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Citation needed. Having a dozen chicken in a large yard seems to me to be pretty nice for the chicken.
      - spiderfarmer 9y ago
        You forget that nature is brutal. http://www.livingthecountrylife.com/animals/poultry/10-poultry-problems/ http://www.livingthecountrylife.com/animals/poultry/10-poult...
      - cool_username 9y ago
farnsworth 9y ago
The Netherlands will soon be a massive exporter of flood-control knowledge and technology as well. It's like they've been practicing for global warming for the entire lifetime of their country.
- stingraycharles 9y ago
  Well we "foolishly" decided to build half our country below sea level. We've seen this interest in the past in the afterwake of Katrina, and we've been exporting this knowledge for quite some time. Unfortunately, it's probably a difficult problem to solve on the massive scale the US needs.
  - hwillis 9y ago
    > We've seen this interest in the past in the afterwake of Katrina, and we've been exporting this knowledge for quite some time. Unfortunately, it's probably a difficult problem to solve on the massive scale the US needs. Interestingly, this is a nearly 200 year old problem in America. Most spectacularly in Chicago[1], where the city was barely above the natural water table (Lake Michigan). As the city grew they produced more sewage and the ground was unable to absorb water quickly enough, so water began to backflow into the sewage system. A single Cholera outbreak in these conditions killed 6% of the population. The solution at the time was to just build the sewers above ground, which was obviously a terrible idea. Over 20 years they began raising most of Chicago over 6' into the air. I think this isn't necessary with modern sewage, but in the coming decades we may see stuff like this again for east and west coast cities in the US. It's cheaper to raise entire cities than rebuild them. More energy in the atmosphere means more violent storms, so Southern coastal cities will probably have to move inland. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
    - selimthegrim 9y ago
      I presume this is why they reversed the river too?
tzury 9y ago
The Hague produces vegetables and fish in a self sustaining loop: Fish waste fertilizes plants, which filter the water for the fish. Local restaurants proudly offer the veggies and “city swimmers.” As a result, it takes about 1/10 of the amount of water it takes to grow 1 pound of tomatoes in the US. See more at https://qz.com/907971/the-netherlands-basically-reinvented-the-tomato/ https://qz.com/907971/the-netherlands-basically-reinvented-t...
- deleted 9y ago
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aluhut 9y ago
I just wish they would fix that taste problems. I'm sick of tasteless tomatoes...
- hellofunk 9y ago
  Just buy any of the many other tomatoes available at a Dutch grocery other than the cheapest option.
  - aluhut 9y ago
    I live in Germany and this was a general statement (even though we get very much from the Netherlands). Most of them taste like nothing. Sometimes even those who are especially marked as "something something sweet" taste like nothing most of the time. I rarely buy the cheapest option. Most of the times we get the most expensive Bio (organic) ones. This legend needs to die. Just like the one that says that marked as "local" tomatoes (vegetables) taste better (or taste at all). For some times I thought I could smell it. Doesn't work anymore. There is no system anymore as long as you buy in a supermarket here. Unfortunately I'm asleep at local market times or they are when I'm at work but I'm sure you can get the good stuff there because my parents grow them in their garden. But this is not the problem we are talking about here. This is the 21st century. I can't believe that I can't get something as simple as tomatoes with taste for pretty hefty prices in a supermarket. It's not like it was always this way. I can remember very good the moment where we switched from big tomatoes to those cocktail ones because they did not taste like water. Then those became tasteless, I've now seen micro tomatoes. Maybe there is some taste left...
    - hellofunk 9y ago
      I have definitely noticed a big difference in flavor among the common different tomato varieties available at a typical Dutch grocery.
  - tirant 9y ago
    Even the most expensive tomatoes at AH suck in flavour compared to the cheapest you can get in Spain or ITaly.
eggie5 9y ago
produce is remarkably cheap at the markets in Amsterdam compared to southern California. Chicken is much more expensive.
polskibus 9y ago
The food from the Netherlands is tasteless compared to Spanish or Italian in all seasons of the year, in the summer, all produce in Europe beats it. High yields in a country that does not have record sunlight throughought entire year, can only be achieved by abusing chemicals in the process, faking natural conditions, etc. Low amount of natural sunlight can easily be tested using your taste buds. If their farmer switch to other varieties, without slowing down and reducing the yields, they will still harvest tasteless produce in comparison to other countries that have better conditions or "slower" production.
- zappo2938 9y ago
  You sound like every French, Spanish, and Italian chef I've worked for.
  - polskibus 9y ago
    I'm actually a casual Polish consumer. While we get similar amount of sun as the Dutch do, our produce is much better in the summer than theirs. Poland has lower yields, we have much more land than they do (lower pressure for efficiency), being a bit backwards to the Western Europe actually results in better food. In early Spring and late Autumn, I'd always pick imported French or Spanish produce over Dutch.
    - deleted 9y ago
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- cynicalreason 9y ago
  I lived for 2 years in the UK - I didn't understand how they could eat that stuff ... it literally has no taste. Moved back home for 3 years and now I'm living in the Netherlands for the past year .. it tastes like nothing, the tomatoes, the cabbage, the carrots .. the parsley .. they all are so bland. We found some actual farms around that we got some actually tasty stuff during season .. but the stuff in the supermarkets tastes like grass.
- gvd 9y ago
ars 9y ago
You can do some amazing things with enough energy! And the Netherlands have a lot of extra energy because of all the geothermal energy they get. This is not [yet] replicable to other places though. Hopefully soon - unlimited energy would utterly change the world.
- jorams 9y ago
  Do you have more information on this geothermal energy? Clicking around here[1] suggests the Netherlands doesn't actually use much geothermal energy at all. [1]: https://www.geothermal-energy.org/direct_uses/netherlands.html https://www.geothermal-energy.org/direct_uses/netherlands.ht...
  - mcv 9y ago
    It's also news to me. Most of our energy still comes from coal and gas, I believe. I believe we were once ahead of the pack in wind energy, but the conservative politics of the past decade and a half has made us fall behind the rest of Europe in switching to sustainable energy.
  - ars 9y ago
    From the article: "The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands."
  - jstsch 9y ago
    It's deep geothermic energy, you gotta drill >500 meters to get to it. So indeed not as easy as for example Iceland.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Have you got them confused with Iceland, or are thinking of wind energy?
  - ars 9y ago
    I saw this in the article: "The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands."
tuyguntn 9y ago
Really interesting, are there any resources I can read about techniques used in Netherlands agriculture industry. I have 5 ha (1 ha = 10.000 m2) land in my home country, but I do not know how to use it, even for what I can use. I will be really glad if someone points out me profitable/most profitable things for this land. (I am from Central Asia, traveling and working abroad)
- kbart 9y ago
  Farming is a very localized activity as it greatly depends on a climate, soil type, irrigation, demand etc., so I doubt anybody from outside can help you with that. See what neighboring similar sized farms are growing, chances are that they have been doing this for years and have already optimized for the best value.
Someone 9y ago
Yields are high, yes, but ranking by export volume isn't fair to larger countries. If you group the Netherlands with neighboring Great Britain, Germany, Belgium and France (combined ballpark half the population of the USA), export volume halves.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  Yet if you look at the total value of the exports, the Netherlands is second in the world only after the U.S. For a tiny nation that is quite impressive.
  - mcv 9y ago
    A tiny and very densely populated country. That we manage to produce so much food is amazing enough in itself, but you'd think we'd need it for ourselves. Maybe we import all our own food, or maybe we really have such a gigantic surplus.
EliRivers 9y ago
The amount of privileged, snotty complaining here about how they don't like the taste. If you don't like the taste, don't buy it; pay extra for something you do like the taste of. They're able to make a lot more food on a lot less land using a lot fewer resources. As far as I'm concerned, it's basically magic and given that the spectre of starvation has loomed over humanity almost forever, and is by no means permanently banished to the past, coming up with ways to make more of the thing that keeps every human alive using less space and fewer resources is not deserving of snotty replies about how people don't like the taste. Nobody's forcing you to eat it.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  I agree, there are a lot of strange comments here. First of all, you can get all kinds of tomatoes in the Netherlands, but everyone is talking about the super budget tomato that is so cheap it's nearly free. Second, there's a lot more than tomatoes to enjoy in the Netherlands. They have great asparagus, excellent bakeries, high-quality and cheap milk and yogurt, reasonably-priced and delicious fish. Lots of other vegetables are no less tasty in Holland than I've experienced in the U.S. or Asia, such as potatoes, cabbage, onions, broccoli, carrots. That the Dutch have figured out how to fill a demand for cheap vegetables for those who want them is not a bad thing.
  - davedx 9y ago
    Yep. I moved to the Netherlands from the UK 8 years ago, and I've found the quality of food in general to be consistently better than back home.
    - kbart 9y ago
      It would be hard to find a country with worse food than UK, so no big surprise here. Just my personal experience reflected by many friends acquaintances living there.
- sien 9y ago
  Wonder if there is someone out there figuring out there is also a market to find with better tasting things. Mind you, perhaps it's not that big a thing if bland tasting food has done so well. But these things also change. Look at how coffee has improved so much in the past 20 years for many consumers.
5_minutes 9y ago
In the whole Dutch food line, shortcuts are being made for saving a cent here and there, at any expense - resulting in inferior products, over the whole line. Grapes without pits, soft bread that stays good for 2 weeks, chickens that shrink to half after baking, everything is full of sugar, ... This is what we can appreciate about the South, lots of things are done not so efficiently but quite often with higher quality.
ciconia 9y ago
For all those complaining about the (lack of) taste - the best tasting tomatoes are the ones you grow yourself in your back yard, and this is from personal experience. You can muse all you want about how Italian tomatoes are superior to Dutch ones, but nothing can beat the knowledge that what you have in your plate was grown by yourself on your own little plot of earth, with just a bit of patience and diligence.
- nickserv 9y ago
  Quite right, and even apartment dwellers can easily have a few tomato plants. One thing that's critical is not to use hybrid (F1) seeds, they don't breed true / aren't reproducible, so you need to buy seeds every year. This means the plants will never adapt to your particular soil and climate. Unfortunately these are the most common seeds found on the market.
- mamcx 9y ago
  That maybe in USA/Europe. Here in latin-america most food is great. Obviously USA-style food is already here that taste bad. For example, Mac Donalds is always considered terrible here...
victornomad 9y ago
Lots of comments here about tomatoes without flavor. Tomatoes are seasonal too, best ones are in summer. That's why people made sauces and kept them for the winter. Willing to have fresh tasty tomatoes during the whole year is not an easy task... Another factor is that tomatoes are harvested green and ripened using ethylene gas just before hitting the shelves.
dep_b 9y ago
I was actually surprised that in Argentina most fruits and vegetables are exactly the same as in Holland. No difference at all! It must be the same efficient way of growing things all year round that the supermarkets use.
abalone 9y ago
What’s the energy cost of all that artificial lighting? The article notes that one of the farms produces its own (geothermal) energy. But is this generally true? The article makes much of exporting knowledge. But how much of the “sustainability” of this model is tied to cheap renewable energy sources? Like geothermal in the Netherlands. One researcher notes “on the assumption of efficient LED lighting, I estimate that plants like potato or tomato that produce a fleshy food product require about 1,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity for each kilogram of edible tissue they produce.” About the same as what a refrigerator uses in a year.[1] For example there’s a New York indoor farming startup called Bowery Farms. Its gotten some tech VC and coverage in the tech press. Its marketing is all “green”. They claim to use “far fewer resources” while producing “100x more on the same land... 365 days a year.” They mention how very little water they use. But if you look closely, they’re suspiciously silent on energy use.[2] [1] http://www.salon.com/2016/02/17/enough_with_the_vertical_farming_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2016/02/17/enough_with_the_vertical_far... [2] http://boweryfarming.com/ http://boweryfarming.com/
- pakitan 9y ago
  That 1200kWh figure doesn't make any sense. It says that "edible tissue" excludes water content. Each kg of tomatoes has about 950g of water. That means 60kWh per kg of tomatoes, which will cost about 5 EUR. You won't be able to sell your produce at that price.
disordinary 9y ago
I can see this being a good option for fruit and vegetable production but I don't see this sort of intense farming being good for animals no matter how humane. There has been a big movement for completely free range and outdoor reared animals, although there are a lot of issues to do with CO2 emissions and run off from farms that are configured this way.
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cyphunk 9y ago
Oh my, NL tomatos taste like water sponges. This fact depresses me more than it should :/ They are the predominate tomato sold in DE, UK and others. Really, try a tomato from southern europe or some places in eastern europe, preferably while in southern or eastern europe.
pvaldes 9y ago
> More than a third of all global trade in vegetable seeds originates in the Netherlands. This is the point. Dutch earn a lot of money with vegetables because they sell most of the seeds of vegetables that Spain, Italy, Morocco and other mediterranean countries use industrially. Because disease resistance, homogeneity of size and time of production, research, availability, and sometimes... plain piratery and renaming of old varieties. Read about the napoleon cherry for example. 1) Tomato is a tropical plant that loves warm and light. More sun means more flavour. You can pick the seeds of the same variety of tomato and culture some in Germany and other in Spain. Unless you can afford to spend a lot of electricity, the last will be always better. The reality is that the bland and the yummy tomato will often belong to exactly the same industrial variety, because... 2)... different grades of quality. Wouldn't be fair to match the cheapest tomato against the better. 3) Consumers do not select only by flavour, they have other interests and will reject a soft and dented tomato. You can sell the first strawberries of the year for a higher price, even if they have virtually no time to develop any flavour. People still love it because strawberries with low flavour is still a better deal that no strawberries at all. 4) more rippen tomato taste better, but if you want your tomato to travel 3000 Km before to reach your table in perfect shape and colour you need to sacrifice something. Small farmers and amateurs that sell locally can afford to pick the fruit more ripe. 5) Antique varieties "taste better", you can enjoy the different flavour variations that came with a bigger genetic diversity, but tomato is a short living species and, unlike good antique apples or plums, seeds of good and true heirloom varieties of tomato are very difficult to find and there is almost not profit in selling it online.
IkmoIkmo 9y ago
I'm so freaking tired of seeing articles about exciting agricultural tech, just to click on them and find a whole bunch of lettuce. (and tomatoes) I mean, really, try measuring it yourself. They're virtually always all about lettuce. Lettuce doesn't feed the world, staple foods do. Virtually nobody eats a whole head of green leaf lettuce a day, but even if they did, it'd be 50 calories. That's less calories than in a lollipop. Lettuce is 95% water. It means if you want to eat say 10% of your daily energy intake in lettuce, you need to eat 250 calories of lettuce, that means 5 heads of lettuce and basically a soda can full of water. That's not food, the way we normally talk about food. It's water, with a bunch of fibers and a tiny amount of minerals and nutrients. Which is also the reason it's so easy to grow. You can grow a head of lettuce indoors under artificial lighting in a shitty growth medium in 3 weeks flat from start to finish, because you're basically mixing a tiny amount of energy with a bunch of water. And that's precisely why all these new companies demo it. Look at us, we can grow a gazillion pretty green nature looking things you put in salads, the pinnacle of healthy foods, in no time, using much less water, factory-style. It's a joke. Same with tomatoes. Five regular tomatoes is about another 55 calories, just like an entire head of lettuce, or a lollipop. And who eats five whole tomatoes on a daily basis? And don't get me wrong, I've eaten about 1/3rd of a head of lettuce and two tomatoes pretty much every day of my life for more than 20 years. I like eating them and will continue to do so. Oh and I'm Dutch, too. But I also get tired of 'revolutionary' food tech pretending as their new ways of cultivating it changes agriculture. It doesn't. It's just a fancy story for a fancy urban farm that sells overpriced produce to a fancy 'local' salad bar that has zero impact on our environment. I want to see revolutions in the production of staple foods, too, as well as a cultural change in the way we shape our diets and the food we choose to consume. So no, the Dutch don't feed the world because we've got a bunch of high-yield lettuce/tomato installations. Nonetheless a lot of interesting points in the article, but I just wish it was a lot less about lettuce and tomatoes. It's really becoming a bit of a parody, anyone else feel the same? You could literally do an Onion piece on an article featuring a 26 year old design student who runs a hydroponics lettuce factory in an old city office.
pyroinferno 9y ago
Title is misleading. The real agricultural giants are America and China, when based on actual statistics.

334 points by deegles 9y ago

lucideer 9y ago

Can we put "(Netherlands)" after the word "country" to overcome the clickbait title?

lucb1e 9y ago
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.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  I'd go for "Netherlands feeds the world, despite its size."
sctb 9y ago
Certainly, we've updated the title from “This Tiny Country Feeds the World” to a representative phrase from the subtitle.

madmax108 9y ago

Coming 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India

bbvnvlt 9y ago
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.
- WJW 9y ago
  Also needed is a very stable environment, but infrastructurally and politically. A lot of these investments would never be feasible without for example the stability of the electricity network or the road network. It can be argued if this is caused by the government, but the Dutch seem more maintenance-minded than most other countries I visited. Probably caused by all the dikes: if not maintaining something properly will kill your entire village, you have a lot of incentive to become very good at it.
  - bbvnvlt 9y ago
    We have, in fact, a dedicated form of local government for water management [1], and: > These regional water authorities are among the oldest forms of local government in the Netherlands, some of them having been founded in the 13th century. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  To add to your point about economies of scale, Indian farmers are a reliable political bloc. Turning a million unproductive farmers into 10,000 highly-productive ones is, from a political perspective, disastrous if you rely on that bloc. It's a similar phenomenon to public union political capture in certain American cities.
- pakitan 9y ago
  Yeah, I was wondering about that. Some of those farms look like they have million(s) dollars worth of equipment and infrastructure. And farming isn't exactly a high-margin industry so starting a new farm must be quite a risky venture. Are there government programs that help with the financing or it's all private capital?

Soviet 9y ago

I'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.

harigov 9y ago
It will probably improve as time goes by.
- gumby 9y ago
  As long as there's an incentive for it to get better. Based on my experience in the US the incentives run the other way :-(. All about cost.
tchaffee 9y ago
The article said the country produces no GMOs. Regular size tomatoes can be lacking in flavor. But I find the small tomatoes from there delicious. Some other vegetables like peppers are pretty tasty too. It's not all bad.
hellofunk 9y ago
I think GMO tomatoes have not been commercially grown anywhere in the world since the 1990's, at least not on any meaningful scale.

cirrus-clouds 9y ago

Here 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).

jules 9y ago
There are flavourful varieties such as Tasty Tom or small plum tomatoes, but they are much more expensive at €10 per kg versus €2 per kg for a basic variety and less than €1 per kg for the most tasteless variety.
- tirant 9y ago
  Even Tasty Tom or small plum from AH are terrible compared what you can get locally in Spain or Italy to give an example.
johansch 9y ago
In Sweden we tend to get e.g. tomatoes from the Netherlands, Spain and Morocco. From a consumer perspective it seems random - the price doesn't really factor in at all. Tomatoes from the Netherlands are almost always tasteless. Tomatoes from Spain are often tasty, but sometimes tasteless. Tomatoes from Morocco are sometimes tasteless and sometimes horrible. So I look for Tomatoes grown in Spain and wish for the best...
- ardit33 9y ago
  Italian, or Albanian tomatoes are the best. You guys live so up-north, that it takes a long time for tomatoes to get there so you are most likely going to get shipped the 1. Tasteless type, that happens to resist longer on shelves, or 2. Unripped tomatoes that get ripened on the way there. There is a huge difference in taste between in vine ripped tomatoes and the one they are picked up still green. The northeast US has the same problem. Tomatoes in California are usually pretty good, tomatoes in Boston taste like crap. (the joke is that Boston is the last stop for a tomato truck, before they get thrown in the ocean as trash).

thriftwy 9y ago

There will be 10 billion people on Earth. Growing food for them needs a tiny area in highly developed countries via industrial farming. But what would that 10bn people do then?

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Are you seriously asking what productive work people can do other than farming?
- thriftwy 9y ago
  I'm seriously asking what productive work can billions of people from underdeveloped and unstable countries do. Without access to lucrative markets, too.
  - forkLding 9y ago
    Move from primary to secondary and then tertiary or just jump to tertiary or even reach quanternary sector Talking about three sector theory
    - imtringued 9y ago
      I think the parent implies that automation and lack of capital to invest into automation will make those sectors inaccessible to untrained and unskilled people in developing countries. Usually inequality between countries or people is reduced by rich and poor trading with each other. But what if the poor have nothing to offer to the rich? Then the only option is to work for their own sustenance which means farming.
      - thriftwy 9y ago
        There's this saying about comparative advantage. But what happens when poor country doesn't have any comparative advantages over rich country? Or a few really tiny and disgusting ones which definitely won't support hundreds of millions people?

novalis78 9y ago

Makes me wonder how much of this could be replicated and what it would yield in states (Florida) with amazing sunshine and access to fresh water and cheap power.

kogepathic 9y ago
> in states (Florida) with amazing sunshine and access to fresh water and cheap power. Actually the model would work better in states with less arable land or with a colder climate. Reasons: 1. Better food security, less reliance on imported food 2. As the article states, water use is much lower than open field farming, so it's better for places with constrained resources 3. More environmental if the food is grown closer to the consumers as there's less need for storage and transport. Similar to #1 4. Sunshine doesn't really matter for these greenhouses since a lot of them are using LED lights tuned to the species they're growing to increase output. [0] [0] https://www.verticalfarmingconference.com/indoor-farming/japans-panasonic-moves-vertical-farming-singapore/ https://www.verticalfarmingconference.com/indoor-farming/jap...

hownottowrite 9y ago

The Dutch are also one of the largest landholders in the US with 4.8 million acres of farmland.[0] [0] https://www.agdaily.com/insights/not-just-u-s-farmland-foreign-held-whats-intentions/ https://www.agdaily.com/insights/not-just-u-s-farmland-forei...

gumby 9y ago

Quite interesting that the Duijvestijns facility is allegedly close to fertilizer and energy self-sufficient. What about the economics?

linuxorgasms 9y ago

I make my own tomatoes ,and i make them damn good. screw them capitalist grocery stores :D

tpeo 9y ago

I think that how much a country is "feeding the world" would be more properly measured in metric tons, rather than dollars. So saying that the Netherlands are "feeding the world" on account of the total value of their agricultural exports seems to me a bit misleading. Staples are cheap.

jacquesm 9y ago
This is actually where the story gets really interesting. NL is producing an incredible amount of tonnage for such a small country. The division between lower grade (tasting poorly) vegetables and more tasty quality stuff (which is far more expensive) is severely lopsided (towards the poorer tasting variety). Because vegetables are mostly water by weight quite a lot of produce leaves the country in freeze dried form to save on shipping.

spiderfarmer 9y ago

I am from the Netherlands and I have to say that regretably a large part of our country thinks that our farmers are incompetent, stupid, nature-hating animal bashers because of how the media treats them. It's gross how strong the lobby is against our farmers, even though they're clearly among the most competent, intelligent, sustainable farmers around the world. They always use cherry-picked facts (and even blatant lies), decades old photo and video materials and examples from foreign farms against our farmers, in order to put pressure on the government to regulate our farmers even more, to the point where our farmers feel that they are nothing more than underpaid workers for a huge governmental organization.

mverwijs 9y ago
From the article: " This high-tech broiler house holds up to 150,000 birds, from hatching to harvesting" No 'decades old photo' either. I find it hard to believe someone loving live animals would put them in such a place.
- spiderfarmer 9y ago
  These 150.000 birds are getting much better care from this single farmer than when they were spread over 10.000 households like they were 100 years ago.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Citation needed. Having a dozen chicken in a large yard seems to me to be pretty nice for the chicken.
    - spiderfarmer 9y ago
      You forget that nature is brutal. http://www.livingthecountrylife.com/animals/poultry/10-poultry-problems/ http://www.livingthecountrylife.com/animals/poultry/10-poult...
    - cool_username 9y ago

farnsworth 9y ago

The Netherlands will soon be a massive exporter of flood-control knowledge and technology as well. It's like they've been practicing for global warming for the entire lifetime of their country.

stingraycharles 9y ago
Well we "foolishly" decided to build half our country below sea level. We've seen this interest in the past in the afterwake of Katrina, and we've been exporting this knowledge for quite some time. Unfortunately, it's probably a difficult problem to solve on the massive scale the US needs.
- hwillis 9y ago
  > We've seen this interest in the past in the afterwake of Katrina, and we've been exporting this knowledge for quite some time. Unfortunately, it's probably a difficult problem to solve on the massive scale the US needs. Interestingly, this is a nearly 200 year old problem in America. Most spectacularly in Chicago[1], where the city was barely above the natural water table (Lake Michigan). As the city grew they produced more sewage and the ground was unable to absorb water quickly enough, so water began to backflow into the sewage system. A single Cholera outbreak in these conditions killed 6% of the population. The solution at the time was to just build the sewers above ground, which was obviously a terrible idea. Over 20 years they began raising most of Chicago over 6' into the air. I think this isn't necessary with modern sewage, but in the coming decades we may see stuff like this again for east and west coast cities in the US. It's cheaper to raise entire cities than rebuild them. More energy in the atmosphere means more violent storms, so Southern coastal cities will probably have to move inland. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
  - selimthegrim 9y ago
    I presume this is why they reversed the river too?

tzury 9y ago

The Hague produces vegetables and fish in a self sustaining loop: Fish waste fertilizes plants, which filter the water for the fish. Local restaurants proudly offer the veggies and “city swimmers.” As a result, it takes about 1/10 of the amount of water it takes to grow 1 pound of tomatoes in the US. See more at https://qz.com/907971/the-netherlands-basically-reinvented-the-tomato/ https://qz.com/907971/the-netherlands-basically-reinvented-t...

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aluhut 9y ago

I just wish they would fix that taste problems. I'm sick of tasteless tomatoes...

hellofunk 9y ago
Just buy any of the many other tomatoes available at a Dutch grocery other than the cheapest option.
- aluhut 9y ago
  I live in Germany and this was a general statement (even though we get very much from the Netherlands). Most of them taste like nothing. Sometimes even those who are especially marked as "something something sweet" taste like nothing most of the time. I rarely buy the cheapest option. Most of the times we get the most expensive Bio (organic) ones. This legend needs to die. Just like the one that says that marked as "local" tomatoes (vegetables) taste better (or taste at all). For some times I thought I could smell it. Doesn't work anymore. There is no system anymore as long as you buy in a supermarket here. Unfortunately I'm asleep at local market times or they are when I'm at work but I'm sure you can get the good stuff there because my parents grow them in their garden. But this is not the problem we are talking about here. This is the 21st century. I can't believe that I can't get something as simple as tomatoes with taste for pretty hefty prices in a supermarket. It's not like it was always this way. I can remember very good the moment where we switched from big tomatoes to those cocktail ones because they did not taste like water. Then those became tasteless, I've now seen micro tomatoes. Maybe there is some taste left...
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    I have definitely noticed a big difference in flavor among the common different tomato varieties available at a typical Dutch grocery.
- tirant 9y ago
  Even the most expensive tomatoes at AH suck in flavour compared to the cheapest you can get in Spain or ITaly.

eggie5 9y ago

produce is remarkably cheap at the markets in Amsterdam compared to southern California. Chicken is much more expensive.

polskibus 9y ago

The food from the Netherlands is tasteless compared to Spanish or Italian in all seasons of the year, in the summer, all produce in Europe beats it. High yields in a country that does not have record sunlight throughought entire year, can only be achieved by abusing chemicals in the process, faking natural conditions, etc. Low amount of natural sunlight can easily be tested using your taste buds. If their farmer switch to other varieties, without slowing down and reducing the yields, they will still harvest tasteless produce in comparison to other countries that have better conditions or "slower" production.

zappo2938 9y ago
You sound like every French, Spanish, and Italian chef I've worked for.
- polskibus 9y ago
  I'm actually a casual Polish consumer. While we get similar amount of sun as the Dutch do, our produce is much better in the summer than theirs. Poland has lower yields, we have much more land than they do (lower pressure for efficiency), being a bit backwards to the Western Europe actually results in better food. In early Spring and late Autumn, I'd always pick imported French or Spanish produce over Dutch.
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cynicalreason 9y ago
I lived for 2 years in the UK - I didn't understand how they could eat that stuff ... it literally has no taste. Moved back home for 3 years and now I'm living in the Netherlands for the past year .. it tastes like nothing, the tomatoes, the cabbage, the carrots .. the parsley .. they all are so bland. We found some actual farms around that we got some actually tasty stuff during season .. but the stuff in the supermarkets tastes like grass.
gvd 9y ago

ars 9y ago

You can do some amazing things with enough energy! And the Netherlands have a lot of extra energy because of all the geothermal energy they get. This is not [yet] replicable to other places though. Hopefully soon - unlimited energy would utterly change the world.

jorams 9y ago
Do you have more information on this geothermal energy? Clicking around here[1] suggests the Netherlands doesn't actually use much geothermal energy at all. [1]: https://www.geothermal-energy.org/direct_uses/netherlands.html https://www.geothermal-energy.org/direct_uses/netherlands.ht...
- mcv 9y ago
  It's also news to me. Most of our energy still comes from coal and gas, I believe. I believe we were once ahead of the pack in wind energy, but the conservative politics of the past decade and a half has made us fall behind the rest of Europe in switching to sustainable energy.
- ars 9y ago
  From the article: "The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands."
- jstsch 9y ago
  It's deep geothermic energy, you gotta drill >500 meters to get to it. So indeed not as easy as for example Iceland.
pjc50 9y ago
Have you got them confused with Iceland, or are thinking of wind energy?
- ars 9y ago
  I saw this in the article: "The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands."

tuyguntn 9y ago

Really interesting, are there any resources I can read about techniques used in Netherlands agriculture industry. I have 5 ha (1 ha = 10.000 m2) land in my home country, but I do not know how to use it, even for what I can use. I will be really glad if someone points out me profitable/most profitable things for this land. (I am from Central Asia, traveling and working abroad)

kbart 9y ago
Farming is a very localized activity as it greatly depends on a climate, soil type, irrigation, demand etc., so I doubt anybody from outside can help you with that. See what neighboring similar sized farms are growing, chances are that they have been doing this for years and have already optimized for the best value.

Someone 9y ago

Yields are high, yes, but ranking by export volume isn't fair to larger countries. If you group the Netherlands with neighboring Great Britain, Germany, Belgium and France (combined ballpark half the population of the USA), export volume halves.

hellofunk 9y ago
Yet if you look at the total value of the exports, the Netherlands is second in the world only after the U.S. For a tiny nation that is quite impressive.
- mcv 9y ago
  A tiny and very densely populated country. That we manage to produce so much food is amazing enough in itself, but you'd think we'd need it for ourselves. Maybe we import all our own food, or maybe we really have such a gigantic surplus.

EliRivers 9y ago

The amount of privileged, snotty complaining here about how they don't like the taste. If you don't like the taste, don't buy it; pay extra for something you do like the taste of. They're able to make a lot more food on a lot less land using a lot fewer resources. As far as I'm concerned, it's basically magic and given that the spectre of starvation has loomed over humanity almost forever, and is by no means permanently banished to the past, coming up with ways to make more of the thing that keeps every human alive using less space and fewer resources is not deserving of snotty replies about how people don't like the taste. Nobody's forcing you to eat it.

hellofunk 9y ago
I agree, there are a lot of strange comments here. First of all, you can get all kinds of tomatoes in the Netherlands, but everyone is talking about the super budget tomato that is so cheap it's nearly free. Second, there's a lot more than tomatoes to enjoy in the Netherlands. They have great asparagus, excellent bakeries, high-quality and cheap milk and yogurt, reasonably-priced and delicious fish. Lots of other vegetables are no less tasty in Holland than I've experienced in the U.S. or Asia, such as potatoes, cabbage, onions, broccoli, carrots. That the Dutch have figured out how to fill a demand for cheap vegetables for those who want them is not a bad thing.
- davedx 9y ago
  Yep. I moved to the Netherlands from the UK 8 years ago, and I've found the quality of food in general to be consistently better than back home.
  - kbart 9y ago
    It would be hard to find a country with worse food than UK, so no big surprise here. Just my personal experience reflected by many friends acquaintances living there.
sien 9y ago
Wonder if there is someone out there figuring out there is also a market to find with better tasting things. Mind you, perhaps it's not that big a thing if bland tasting food has done so well. But these things also change. Look at how coffee has improved so much in the past 20 years for many consumers.

5_minutes 9y ago

In the whole Dutch food line, shortcuts are being made for saving a cent here and there, at any expense - resulting in inferior products, over the whole line. Grapes without pits, soft bread that stays good for 2 weeks, chickens that shrink to half after baking, everything is full of sugar, ... This is what we can appreciate about the South, lots of things are done not so efficiently but quite often with higher quality.

ciconia 9y ago

For all those complaining about the (lack of) taste - the best tasting tomatoes are the ones you grow yourself in your back yard, and this is from personal experience. You can muse all you want about how Italian tomatoes are superior to Dutch ones, but nothing can beat the knowledge that what you have in your plate was grown by yourself on your own little plot of earth, with just a bit of patience and diligence.

nickserv 9y ago
Quite right, and even apartment dwellers can easily have a few tomato plants. One thing that's critical is not to use hybrid (F1) seeds, they don't breed true / aren't reproducible, so you need to buy seeds every year. This means the plants will never adapt to your particular soil and climate. Unfortunately these are the most common seeds found on the market.
mamcx 9y ago
That maybe in USA/Europe. Here in latin-america most food is great. Obviously USA-style food is already here that taste bad. For example, Mac Donalds is always considered terrible here...

victornomad 9y ago

Lots of comments here about tomatoes without flavor. Tomatoes are seasonal too, best ones are in summer. That's why people made sauces and kept them for the winter. Willing to have fresh tasty tomatoes during the whole year is not an easy task... Another factor is that tomatoes are harvested green and ripened using ethylene gas just before hitting the shelves.

dep_b 9y ago

I was actually surprised that in Argentina most fruits and vegetables are exactly the same as in Holland. No difference at all! It must be the same efficient way of growing things all year round that the supermarkets use.

abalone 9y ago

What’s the energy cost of all that artificial lighting? The article notes that one of the farms produces its own (geothermal) energy. But is this generally true? The article makes much of exporting knowledge. But how much of the “sustainability” of this model is tied to cheap renewable energy sources? Like geothermal in the Netherlands. One researcher notes “on the assumption of efficient LED lighting, I estimate that plants like potato or tomato that produce a fleshy food product require about 1,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity for each kilogram of edible tissue they produce.” About the same as what a refrigerator uses in a year.[1] For example there’s a New York indoor farming startup called Bowery Farms. Its gotten some tech VC and coverage in the tech press. Its marketing is all “green”. They claim to use “far fewer resources” while producing “100x more on the same land... 365 days a year.” They mention how very little water they use. But if you look closely, they’re suspiciously silent on energy use.[2] [1] http://www.salon.com/2016/02/17/enough_with_the_vertical_farming_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2016/02/17/enough_with_the_vertical_far... [2] http://boweryfarming.com/ http://boweryfarming.com/

pakitan 9y ago
That 1200kWh figure doesn't make any sense. It says that "edible tissue" excludes water content. Each kg of tomatoes has about 950g of water. That means 60kWh per kg of tomatoes, which will cost about 5 EUR. You won't be able to sell your produce at that price.

disordinary 9y ago

I can see this being a good option for fruit and vegetable production but I don't see this sort of intense farming being good for animals no matter how humane. There has been a big movement for completely free range and outdoor reared animals, although there are a lot of issues to do with CO2 emissions and run off from farms that are configured this way.

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cyphunk 9y ago

Oh my, NL tomatos taste like water sponges. This fact depresses me more than it should :/ They are the predominate tomato sold in DE, UK and others. Really, try a tomato from southern europe or some places in eastern europe, preferably while in southern or eastern europe.

pvaldes 9y ago

> More than a third of all global trade in vegetable seeds originates in the Netherlands. This is the point. Dutch earn a lot of money with vegetables because they sell most of the seeds of vegetables that Spain, Italy, Morocco and other mediterranean countries use industrially. Because disease resistance, homogeneity of size and time of production, research, availability, and sometimes... plain piratery and renaming of old varieties. Read about the napoleon cherry for example. 1) Tomato is a tropical plant that loves warm and light. More sun means more flavour. You can pick the seeds of the same variety of tomato and culture some in Germany and other in Spain. Unless you can afford to spend a lot of electricity, the last will be always better. The reality is that the bland and the yummy tomato will often belong to exactly the same industrial variety, because... 2)... different grades of quality. Wouldn't be fair to match the cheapest tomato against the better. 3) Consumers do not select only by flavour, they have other interests and will reject a soft and dented tomato. You can sell the first strawberries of the year for a higher price, even if they have virtually no time to develop any flavour. People still love it because strawberries with low flavour is still a better deal that no strawberries at all. 4) more rippen tomato taste better, but if you want your tomato to travel 3000 Km before to reach your table in perfect shape and colour you need to sacrifice something. Small farmers and amateurs that sell locally can afford to pick the fruit more ripe. 5) Antique varieties "taste better", you can enjoy the different flavour variations that came with a bigger genetic diversity, but tomato is a short living species and, unlike good antique apples or plums, seeds of good and true heirloom varieties of tomato are very difficult to find and there is almost not profit in selling it online.

IkmoIkmo 9y ago

I'm so freaking tired of seeing articles about exciting agricultural tech, just to click on them and find a whole bunch of lettuce. (and tomatoes) I mean, really, try measuring it yourself. They're virtually always all about lettuce. Lettuce doesn't feed the world, staple foods do. Virtually nobody eats a whole head of green leaf lettuce a day, but even if they did, it'd be 50 calories. That's less calories than in a lollipop. Lettuce is 95% water. It means if you want to eat say 10% of your daily energy intake in lettuce, you need to eat 250 calories of lettuce, that means 5 heads of lettuce and basically a soda can full of water. That's not food, the way we normally talk about food. It's water, with a bunch of fibers and a tiny amount of minerals and nutrients. Which is also the reason it's so easy to grow. You can grow a head of lettuce indoors under artificial lighting in a shitty growth medium in 3 weeks flat from start to finish, because you're basically mixing a tiny amount of energy with a bunch of water. And that's precisely why all these new companies demo it. Look at us, we can grow a gazillion pretty green nature looking things you put in salads, the pinnacle of healthy foods, in no time, using much less water, factory-style. It's a joke. Same with tomatoes. Five regular tomatoes is about another 55 calories, just like an entire head of lettuce, or a lollipop. And who eats five whole tomatoes on a daily basis? And don't get me wrong, I've eaten about 1/3rd of a head of lettuce and two tomatoes pretty much every day of my life for more than 20 years. I like eating them and will continue to do so. Oh and I'm Dutch, too. But I also get tired of 'revolutionary' food tech pretending as their new ways of cultivating it changes agriculture. It doesn't. It's just a fancy story for a fancy urban farm that sells overpriced produce to a fancy 'local' salad bar that has zero impact on our environment. I want to see revolutions in the production of staple foods, too, as well as a cultural change in the way we shape our diets and the food we choose to consume. So no, the Dutch don't feed the world because we've got a bunch of high-yield lettuce/tomato installations. Nonetheless a lot of interesting points in the article, but I just wish it was a lot less about lettuce and tomatoes. It's really becoming a bit of a parody, anyone else feel the same? You could literally do an Onion piece on an article featuring a 26 year old design student who runs a hydroponics lettuce factory in an old city office.

pyroinferno 9y ago

Title is misleading. The real agricultural giants are America and China, when based on actual statistics.