Dutch agriculture is completely broken, and these kinds of marketing pieces don't help putting it together again. No, we don't produce more than enough food to

Dutch agriculture is completely broken, and these kinds of marketing pieces don't help putting it together again. No, we don't produce more than enough food to feed all our people, because importing stuff is often still cheaper (which is what we care about the most) and we want a lot of stuff we can't easily grow. In fact, we only produce about a third of the food we eat ourselves, and we can't even do that without a lot of outside inputs. Yes, we export a lot of stuff. So what? It has a huge price on so many levels, it is not benefitting the Dutch that much, if at all. To name but a few: The fossil fuels used for heating greenhouse, powering machines, producing fertilizer, transport, etc are causing dangerous climate change, and will only get more and more expensive in the future. The toxins from the pesticides we use to kill everything we don't want, transform our pastures and what used to be fertile woodlands, into green deserts void of life. Stacking together they cause a not always well understood harm to the consumers of our produce, to the inhabitants next to the production sites and especially the producers of it who are famously dying in their sixties a little too often to be coincidental. Famous for our water management, we are intent of lowering the ground water level so that the heavy machines of industrial scale agriculture can ride on the land. This is disastrous for our ecosystems and makes us drought prone, it also sinks our land even further below sea level. I'm not even talking about how vulnerable to disease monoculture is, how it is not supporting biodiversity at all and how all this dairy and meat production could be so much more efficient if these calories were plant based. I'm also thinking about the brutal animal suffering caused by the industrial production of meat, which is inhuman even if the rules would be followed - which isn't the case. Agriculture is a big contributor to air pollution, which is proven to cause more than half a million deaths in Europe each year. We could furthermore discuss how animal production is a breeding ground for new viruses to develop, and how it drives antibiotics resistence. Dutch agriculture is not healthy at all, not for animals and not for humans. Especially not for the farmers. I'm concerned about the pollution of nitrogen deposits which are by far the most extreme in the Netherlands when looking at Europe, causing ecosystem collapse and species extinction, and which politics has managed to completely ignore, terrified of the disproportionately large political power of its agricultural industry. This is upto the point where the highest judicial body has ruled many permits void. Not only for farming, but many housing projects have been stalled because of this, amidst a housing crisis which caused intense shortage of homes and have driven up the prices in crazy ways. We are not happy. I don't love our agriculture, which takes up a whopping two thirds of our land by the way - not 50% (that number includes water which doesn't make sense), and more than 70 percent of it is not for domestic use. The profits of this 70% disappear mostly in the pockets of big agricultural firms, the average citizen isn't seeing much of its benefits. In any case, they are not used to pay the often exploited immigrants and seasonal labor from eastern Europe a decent wage and living condition. But, the average citizen is asked to cough up taxes used to subsidize agriculture, and bear the cost of destroying our ecosystem, climate, housing market, health and countryside. If anything, agriculture in the Netherlands is a great example of what _not_ to do, especially because it is such a commercial and corporate marketing success. I haven't even mentioned how it drives the divisive politics of extremism. Arguably, we have had our own 6th of January in the often violent rebellions of farmers, sponsored and supported by Big Agro firms, rooted in conspiracy theories and right-wing extremism resisting solving any of the problems I mentioned above by flat out denial and intimidation. And this continues to be a big threat in the years to come, according to our intelligence agency and national coordinator on terrorism. I hate our agriculture.