Before I go into rage mode, I suppose I should ask, why Farmland?
Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.
Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land. What I mean is that if we removed the subsidies the farmers wouldn’t farm their land, the market just doesn’t work to support their production. So we are essentially saying “if you pretend to farm your land we’ll make sure you profit” but even at that they of cause need to try to keep the pretend farming profitable enough that the entire charade pays off, but that means dumping a ton of fertilizer on the land, which tends to run off and ruin streams and seeps into the ground water. Most recently this has led to the agricultural industry competeley and likely semi permanently destroying the fishing industry around one of the major pars of Denmark. So at this point the farmers have to stop.
There’s a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political power because they have a lot of money because of the policies they’ve set up back when they had political power because they had a lot of money… Anyways, so what is actually happening is that the farmers have decided that if their land is unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to them for it.
The government could just cut the subsidies which means we would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely just with the money we spend less. Instead we’ll see a lot of additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line subsidies will increase to “make up” for all the land they “lost”.
Do you think food production has national security implications or do you think "the market" will be happy to sell you food during another global conflict while their own citizens are starving?
Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument. It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?
How does having such a large surplus that you’re an exporter of food jive with national security? It sounds like they already produce more than enough. Exposing food production entirely to market forces is, as you point out, a bad idea.
There’s a big difference between supporting food security and subsidising otherwise unviable land usage and farming practices. In the UK, there are subsidies for upland farming for sheep with produces a negligible amount of food at high cost (monetary and environmental) for next to no return for the farmers even after the subsidy.
Re. green subsidies that is better characterised as investment in technology of the future. You might also like to compare subsidies to the fossil fuel sector as well.
Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark can easily let go of 10% while only having miniscule effects on the economy. Denmark is a very small country and technically has no truly wild nature.
> Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits.
Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced economy and a huge population with high population density. The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it consumes.
EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded. Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive to preserve current production capacity when it makes no finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.
Haiti cut down all their trees. When a hurricane passes through it moves what little top soil they have into the ocean.[1] Haiti overfished their costal waters. Now they do not have fish to eat and worse can not participate in the single biggest economic driver in the Caribbean, scuba diving.
Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s. [2]]
Just having farmland be fields is not very good for the land or the eco system. Breaking up farmland with hedges, woods, wetlands or whatever nature decides it should be is often a good idea. Next best thing is to manually plant trees.
One thing I have wondered was the relative benefits of a concentrated wilderness versus distributed habitat.
The common agricultural policy set-aside distributes payments for the wilderness across many farms (for equity, one supposes), whereas a concentrated wilderness would benefit few (and probably only the landowners).
For a short period I looked into carbon stuff and while forests were good, wetlands were deemed much bigger sinks.
It feels like wetlands is a huge ignored area. If what I read at the time holds (I think it was like 6-12x sequestration rate in some regions), a simple thing like rising sea levels would have a huge impact.
And anthropogenic destruction of wetlands is also a huge issue and one that is relatively easy to reverse in a lot cases (dams, rerouted rivers). And in some cases, water can just be rerouted occasionally to create temperarly wetlands that are good ecosystems as well. Mossy Earth I think is doing some of these.
A lot of “farmland” is unproductive and kept in usage only by heavy subsidies. Additionally, I think a more important/interesting part of the article is taxation of livestock - you reduce the land needed significantly when the amount of livestock is reduced. I’m not vegan/vegetarian but it is “obvious” we should reduce meat consumption for a wide range of reasons and focus on raising livestock in ways that are beneficial to the wider environment.
Yes, the least productive 10% of land represents a much smaller percentage of food production. This is often land in areas that are most environmentally sensitive.
In the UK we pay farmers to raise lamb on marginal land yet they still aren't competitive with lamb shipped from the other side of the world. I'm not sure why we should be subsidising that, especially when there is a lot of environmental damaged associated with it.
Could food security in case of another global crisis be a good enough reason? I don't know anything about the British situation AT ALL, but I think many in Europe think slightly different about the market-based solution when it comes to both food, medicines, and other essentials after corona.
It turns out that when shit hits the fan, countries need to handle the basic needs of their population themselves.
I'm of the opinion food security - even at great expense - is the primary thing a nation should be concerned with as a society. At the level where producing enough calories to feed your total population if things truly hit the fan as a hard requirement for every nation on the planet. This is not something you leave to "free trade" or whatnot. Obviously that doesn't mean every calorie need be provided in the most luxurious form - but in the end, there should be enough food produced to feed your people in the worst of times. Even at great expense and waste during the good times.
That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years. Logically we simply do not need the same amount of land devoted to agriculture as we did before - at least in most cases.
So long as your food security is not being impacted - and I do mean under the worst possible stress model you can come up with - I don't see a problem with plans like this. Land use changes over time, and it should be expected.
Plus, it looks like a large portion of this will be simply a different form of agriculture - forestry. This will probably be more in-demand in 50-100 years with current trends, but that's a wild guess.
> That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years
We also have way more people to feed and house than 100 years ago, you cannot look at productivity increase in isolation, demand for both food and land has also risen significantly.
the Netherlands exports so much food (and meat...) that it becomes a burden on local wildlife and milieu, mostly due to nitrogen emissions, pesticides and fertilizer.
I think it's the same for Denmark, though the mostly hold pigs in stead of cattle.
Nitrogen emissions from farming are a big topic in the Netherlands. We have a right wing populist governments that wants to raise maximum speeds back to 130km/h but they can't because of nitrogen emissions that caused the previous government (also right leaning, pro car, etc.) to lower the limits. Intense cattle farming is a big environmental challenge in both countries and it comes at a price. Lots of farting cows in both countries.
A single cow can produce around 250 to 500 liters of methane per day through belching and farting. Let's take an average of 400 liters/day. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.
400 liters/day × 365 days = 146,000 liters/year.
Convert to kilograms (since methane’s density is ~0.656 kg/m³):
146,000 liters = 146 m³ → 146 × 0.656 kg = 95.8 kg of methane/year per cow.
Methane has a global warming potential (GWP) of about 28 times that of CO₂ over 100 years. So, 1 kg of methane is equivalent to 28 kg of CO₂ in terms of warming effect.
95.8 kg of methane × 28 = 2,682 kg of CO₂ equivalent per year per cow.
2,682 kg CO₂e/year × 1 billion cows = 2.68 billion metric tons of CO₂ equivalent annually.
The parent did not say anything about climate and pointed to actual the problem in The Netherlands: nitrogen deposition. Our nature parks are dying because there is far too much nitrogen deposition from nearby farms.
(But our current right-wing populist government likes to pretend the problem does not exist, so they have to be slapped on the wrists by courts and the EU.)
That's what the industry has been saying here for decades and they tried a lot of things, but the problem has only gotten worse. At some point you have to say - apparently you can't fix it, so we have to buy out farmers near nature reserves.
But the farmers have been intimidating politicians by blocking highways and inner cities with tractors and other equipment. Funnily, if anyone else does this they get arrested, but farmers get a carte blanche to disrupt society.
Nobody wants to shut down all the farming, just reduce it. For example, the Netherlands produces 250% of its own meat consumption. Since it's subsidized, the net financial gain is very low. You could say reducing the production to 125/150% of consumption would leave enough for local consumption plus a little export in good times or a buffer in bad times.
Unfortunately, big agricultural companies hired a marketing company to start a political party which claims to be pro local/small farmers, but is actually just pro big agriculture.
The questions are mainly targeted at the consumption of animal products: meat, dairy products and eggs. Their research shows that reducing the consumption of animal products, and therefore switching from a meat-eating to a vegetarian or vegan diet, reduces land requirements by two-thirds.
I would gently encourage you to engage with the topic rather than a puerile dismissal as “farting cows”. Agriculture is one of the main drivers of climate change (~30%), and and also has associated land usage implications. Ruminants (“farting cows”) directly produce around 6% of our total emissions.
Simple: Germany has a huge export surplus that China and the USA is unwilling to accept anymore. Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South America for exports while balancing it with import of South American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process, but by the Commission).
The problem Germany has to fix is the Common Agricultural Policy, that's one of the pillars of the EU. So, they are using the Green Agenda to force countries to reforest their fields. Of course the whole reforestation program is designed in a way that benefits states (Germany) that have got rid of their forests long time ago, and is unfavorable for countries that developed their agriculture after the WW2 - like Denmark and Finland.
So expect a heated discussion between Germany and France, rise of right wing parties in smaller countries, and a push for stricter integration.
That will be interesting experiment. 1) A growing population require food. 2) Their agricultural sector is a major contributor to their economy, not only farmers but everything around it involves a lot of people and businesses. 3) Many countries rely on Danish agricultural exports (it's massive) to ensure people have food.
The Danish agricultural industry accounts for 1% of GDP and almost 70% of land use, the highest in the world. The Wikipedia page on Denmark doesn't even bother to list it as a major industry (unlike Lego) and the only figures I could find put it at around 8B DKK. Lego does 66B DKK on its own.
(Dane here) - this is a major reversal on the food-security policy that drove not just innovation in intensive farming technologies in Denmark in the late nineteenth century, but also the formation of what is now the EU, post WWII, on a european scale.
Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
Our issues in The Netherlands are probably similar to Denmark's and the biggest issue is not all agriculture. Meat and milk production has an outweighed impact on destroying the environment. You need far more land to grow crops to feed livestock and keeping cows leads to a lot of nitrogen deposition.
We can reduce land use and have food security if people were not so intend on eating/drinking animal products every day (and there are perfectly fine vegetarian alternatives).
I believe the insistence on being a major agricultural producer in the EU despite having some of the largest population densities in the region has a lot to do with it.
Sure, but Europe's not growing. It is purely in "shrink forever" mode. This is easily measured, any time fertility drops below 2.1 that's what happens. But ignore that a moment, what if you wanted to depopulate Europe? This might be a good policy for that. Get the timing just right, and it's not even a genocide... food shortages that don't starve anyone just encourages the last few breeders to put a lid on it, and voila! The fantasy of more than a few out there.
Southern Europe seems to be converting farmland into solar farms. And new forests seem to be all monoculture Eucalyptus, fast growing for commercial reasons, but sadly empty of wildlife.
As much as I'd love for Europe to be reforested, the reduced food security might come back to bite us.
What kinds of forests? For nature, or for lumber? If the latter, what is quality of the timber produced, or will it spark a new wave of power stations burning wood pellets. Lots of questions, with very little detail available in the article.
Indeed. A few years ago I ran across a comparison of old photographs of rural villages (early 20th century) in central Europe vs their present day appearance, taken from similar points of view.
Two things were immediately apparent from the old photographs
- less forest
- tons of fruit trees
Fitting is also this anecdote I heard when visiting a historical mill. They had a huge linden tree in their yard, and they told us that in the olden days this was a symbol of prosperity, because the original owner showed off that they could afford to plant a useless, non-fruit-bearing - a status symbol.
Coming full circle - the best thing would be if we could plant tons of trees that also produce food - something like the baobabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_digitata . E.g. pigs were fed oak's acorns in fall.
Good luck. In the less cohesive Western countries efforts like this are met with both protest by farmers who view their providing calories as almost a sacred task, and by foreign agitprop that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is an attempt at subjugating the people.
> that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is an attempt at subjugating the people
Well, it is. More expensive food means a worse quality of life for normal people. It also means more time spent working to pay for groceries, and less time and money to do things that threaten the elites like accumulating capital or performing activism.
The problem is not production cost, but distribution. A litre of milk is paid at 20c to the producer (never has been cheaper) yet it’s 2€ at the store. The producer makes a few cents on it.
The FoodCo is the one driving price up. Them and consumer behavior.
There’s quite a lot of expensive stuff happening in between filling a tank of milk at the farm, and a consumer purchasing a single bottle at a store near them.
Yes, some necessary (processing, bottling, logistics) some fluff (marketing), and lots of profits.
But the original point was that removing farm capacity will increase consumer prices. Even if doubles farmer prices (to 40c), milk retail prices should only increase by 20c.
Of course, all milk processors (which are a cartel) will double their prices, double their margins, and pitch consumers vs farmers vs ecologists.
No they won't. If they started tomorrow planting 100,000 trees a day, and never took a single day off, they would finish up in 2052. What kind of nursery can even grow 100,000 saplings of conifer a day?
It would take a couple of years at the scale Finnish forest industry is operating.
Large parts of Europe are basically forests that have been temporarily cut down. If you let the land be, the forest will often grow back with minimal effort.
The trees will ride through floods and reduce water flows, improve species diversity for insects, birds, small mammals, improve temperatures and ameliorate winds, provide shelter for farm animals, can enhance grazing. And there's wood to harvest in due course.
There's a lot more reasons to plant trees than direct AGW offset.
A huge amount of farmland is now surplus to production. Grasses and fields of weeds aren't always ideal. Taking land out of production can also attract offset funding for farmers (-yes, this is a secondary economic outcome and may also incur other costs)
People are healthier around trees. People like trees. Even Bill Gates may actually like trees.
When those trees die and then rot or burn, that CO2 will be released right back into the atmosphere. They’ll temporarily hold some, yeah, but it’s like trying to rapidly fire a squirt gun at a fire when someone else is spraying it with a firehose of gasoline.
Especially because trees plant themselves. If they want to set aside the land for forest and seed it a little to get going - great - but those large tree planting operations are a waste of time at best or carbon credit loopholes at worst.
Trees absolutely can help with climate change, although like everything in this universe, there are nuances at play, such as type of tree, location, etc.
We have done a lot of deforestation, and that absolutely has negatively impacted our climate, and we should work to reverse it.
He denies it, and even if he said it, it was 1981 and I doubt he meant "forever".
> Affluence does not equal wisdom.
True
Just waiting for someone to factcheck about planting trees: there must be nuance. In australia we burn em to protect people and the environment for example. We have done it for millenia.
You could plant a trillion trees tomorrow but it won't help anything so long as places like China and India pollute the oceans with millions of tones of plastic waste trash every year. That's in the thousands of tones per day region. The sheer scale of pollution there makes Denmark's measly little contribution just that, peanuts. No wonder the farmers are upset. They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
Before I go into rage mode, I suppose I should ask, why Farmland?
Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.
Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land. What I mean is that if we removed the subsidies the farmers wouldn’t farm their land, the market just doesn’t work to support their production. So we are essentially saying “if you pretend to farm your land we’ll make sure you profit” but even at that they of cause need to try to keep the pretend farming profitable enough that the entire charade pays off, but that means dumping a ton of fertilizer on the land, which tends to run off and ruin streams and seeps into the ground water. Most recently this has led to the agricultural industry competeley and likely semi permanently destroying the fishing industry around one of the major pars of Denmark. So at this point the farmers have to stop.
There’s a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political power because they have a lot of money because of the policies they’ve set up back when they had political power because they had a lot of money… Anyways, so what is actually happening is that the farmers have decided that if their land is unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to them for it.
The government could just cut the subsidies which means we would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely just with the money we spend less. Instead we’ll see a lot of additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line subsidies will increase to “make up” for all the land they “lost”.
Do you think food production has national security implications or do you think "the market" will be happy to sell you food during another global conflict while their own citizens are starving?
Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument. It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?
How does having such a large surplus that you’re an exporter of food jive with national security? It sounds like they already produce more than enough. Exposing food production entirely to market forces is, as you point out, a bad idea.
There’s a big difference between supporting food security and subsidising otherwise unviable land usage and farming practices. In the UK, there are subsidies for upland farming for sheep with produces a negligible amount of food at high cost (monetary and environmental) for next to no return for the farmers even after the subsidy.
Re. green subsidies that is better characterised as investment in technology of the future. You might also like to compare subsidies to the fossil fuel sector as well.
In New Zealand the believe that if they removed farm subsidizes, their farmers would quite. Now they are a massive farm product exporter.
Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark can easily let go of 10% while only having miniscule effects on the economy. Denmark is a very small country and technically has no truly wild nature.
> Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits.
Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced economy and a huge population with high population density. The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it consumes.
EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded. Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive to preserve current production capacity when it makes no finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.
> specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded
No, its because far lobbies are an important political block
Haiti cut down all their trees. When a hurricane passes through it moves what little top soil they have into the ocean.[1] Haiti overfished their costal waters. Now they do not have fish to eat and worse can not participate in the single biggest economic driver in the Caribbean, scuba diving.
Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s. [2]]
[1] https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/08/05/us-funded-trees...
[2] https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl
Just having farmland be fields is not very good for the land or the eco system. Breaking up farmland with hedges, woods, wetlands or whatever nature decides it should be is often a good idea. Next best thing is to manually plant trees.
Edit: add planting trees
> Breaking up farmland
One thing I have wondered was the relative benefits of a concentrated wilderness versus distributed habitat.
The common agricultural policy set-aside distributes payments for the wilderness across many farms (for equity, one supposes), whereas a concentrated wilderness would benefit few (and probably only the landowners).
For a short period I looked into carbon stuff and while forests were good, wetlands were deemed much bigger sinks.
It feels like wetlands is a huge ignored area. If what I read at the time holds (I think it was like 6-12x sequestration rate in some regions), a simple thing like rising sea levels would have a huge impact.
And anthropogenic destruction of wetlands is also a huge issue and one that is relatively easy to reverse in a lot cases (dams, rerouted rivers). And in some cases, water can just be rerouted occasionally to create temperarly wetlands that are good ecosystems as well. Mossy Earth I think is doing some of these.
A lot of “farmland” is unproductive and kept in usage only by heavy subsidies. Additionally, I think a more important/interesting part of the article is taxation of livestock - you reduce the land needed significantly when the amount of livestock is reduced. I’m not vegan/vegetarian but it is “obvious” we should reduce meat consumption for a wide range of reasons and focus on raising livestock in ways that are beneficial to the wider environment.
Yes, the least productive 10% of land represents a much smaller percentage of food production. This is often land in areas that are most environmentally sensitive.
In the UK we pay farmers to raise lamb on marginal land yet they still aren't competitive with lamb shipped from the other side of the world. I'm not sure why we should be subsidising that, especially when there is a lot of environmental damaged associated with it.
Could food security in case of another global crisis be a good enough reason? I don't know anything about the British situation AT ALL, but I think many in Europe think slightly different about the market-based solution when it comes to both food, medicines, and other essentials after corona.
It turns out that when shit hits the fan, countries need to handle the basic needs of their population themselves.
I'm of the opinion food security - even at great expense - is the primary thing a nation should be concerned with as a society. At the level where producing enough calories to feed your total population if things truly hit the fan as a hard requirement for every nation on the planet. This is not something you leave to "free trade" or whatnot. Obviously that doesn't mean every calorie need be provided in the most luxurious form - but in the end, there should be enough food produced to feed your people in the worst of times. Even at great expense and waste during the good times.
That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years. Logically we simply do not need the same amount of land devoted to agriculture as we did before - at least in most cases.
So long as your food security is not being impacted - and I do mean under the worst possible stress model you can come up with - I don't see a problem with plans like this. Land use changes over time, and it should be expected.
Plus, it looks like a large portion of this will be simply a different form of agriculture - forestry. This will probably be more in-demand in 50-100 years with current trends, but that's a wild guess.
Read the post by gklitz: Agricultural practices are ruining the water supply. It's nice to have food security, but you also need drinkable water.
Groundwater in Denmark is drinkable and most people wanna keep it that way. But unfortunately, fertilizer has killed of huge areas of sealife.
> That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years
We also have way more people to feed and house than 100 years ago, you cannot look at productivity increase in isolation, demand for both food and land has also risen significantly.
the Netherlands exports so much food (and meat...) that it becomes a burden on local wildlife and milieu, mostly due to nitrogen emissions, pesticides and fertilizer.
I think it's the same for Denmark, though the mostly hold pigs in stead of cattle.
Where else would you like them to plant trees? Tearing up residential areas to convert to forest would be massively expensive and likely unpopular.
Places that used to be forested and are not productive farmland. There’s lots of places like this, just maybe not in Denmark.
Not really. Trees plant themselves. If it’s not being actively used for something/mowed it’ll turn back into forest.
Tree planting in eroded/damaged ecosystems requires a helping hand - everything from site prep, germination, watering, etc.
Source: I’ve planted thousands of trees.
(In the absence of grass and small tree devouring animals)
In the US that would be a bunch of only invasive species for a long time.
Nitrogen emissions from farming are a big topic in the Netherlands. We have a right wing populist governments that wants to raise maximum speeds back to 130km/h but they can't because of nitrogen emissions that caused the previous government (also right leaning, pro car, etc.) to lower the limits. Intense cattle farming is a big environmental challenge in both countries and it comes at a price. Lots of farting cows in both countries.
The idea that farting cows is moving the needle on climate is absolutely lunacy - barking mad conspiracy theory stuff.
The math here is quite simple.
A single cow can produce around 250 to 500 liters of methane per day through belching and farting. Let's take an average of 400 liters/day. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.
400 liters/day × 365 days = 146,000 liters/year.
Convert to kilograms (since methane’s density is ~0.656 kg/m³):
146,000 liters = 146 m³ → 146 × 0.656 kg = 95.8 kg of methane/year per cow.
Methane has a global warming potential (GWP) of about 28 times that of CO₂ over 100 years. So, 1 kg of methane is equivalent to 28 kg of CO₂ in terms of warming effect.
95.8 kg of methane × 28 = 2,682 kg of CO₂ equivalent per year per cow.
2,682 kg CO₂e/year × 1 billion cows = 2.68 billion metric tons of CO₂ equivalent annually.
Farting maybe, but the impact from cow burps is measurable and no conspiracy theory.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17517715/
The parent did not say anything about climate and pointed to actual the problem in The Netherlands: nitrogen deposition. Our nature parks are dying because there is far too much nitrogen deposition from nearby farms.
(But our current right-wing populist government likes to pretend the problem does not exist, so they have to be slapped on the wrists by courts and the EU.)
Now that’s a real problem, farm animal excrement is an issue. Seems like one that technology can solve?
That's what the industry has been saying here for decades and they tried a lot of things, but the problem has only gotten worse. At some point you have to say - apparently you can't fix it, so we have to buy out farmers near nature reserves.
But the farmers have been intimidating politicians by blocking highways and inner cities with tractors and other equipment. Funnily, if anyone else does this they get arrested, but farmers get a carte blanche to disrupt society.
How do we keep people fed after shutting down farming (at a reasonable cost)? The entire thing seems anti-human…
Nobody wants to shut down all the farming, just reduce it. For example, the Netherlands produces 250% of its own meat consumption. Since it's subsidized, the net financial gain is very low. You could say reducing the production to 125/150% of consumption would leave enough for local consumption plus a little export in good times or a buffer in bad times.
Unfortunately, big agricultural companies hired a marketing company to start a political party which claims to be pro local/small farmers, but is actually just pro big agriculture.
Eating less meat?
The questions are mainly targeted at the consumption of animal products: meat, dairy products and eggs. Their research shows that reducing the consumption of animal products, and therefore switching from a meat-eating to a vegetarian or vegan diet, reduces land requirements by two-thirds.
https://www.uu.nl/en/news/calculate-the-land-use-impact-of-y...
Not everyone even has to stop eating meat. Just reducing meat consumption to 1-2 days per week would go a long way.
I would gently encourage you to engage with the topic rather than a puerile dismissal as “farting cows”. Agriculture is one of the main drivers of climate change (~30%), and and also has associated land usage implications. Ruminants (“farting cows”) directly produce around 6% of our total emissions.
Simple: Germany has a huge export surplus that China and the USA is unwilling to accept anymore. Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South America for exports while balancing it with import of South American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process, but by the Commission). The problem Germany has to fix is the Common Agricultural Policy, that's one of the pillars of the EU. So, they are using the Green Agenda to force countries to reforest their fields. Of course the whole reforestation program is designed in a way that benefits states (Germany) that have got rid of their forests long time ago, and is unfavorable for countries that developed their agriculture after the WW2 - like Denmark and Finland. So expect a heated discussion between Germany and France, rise of right wing parties in smaller countries, and a push for stricter integration.
That will be interesting experiment. 1) A growing population require food. 2) Their agricultural sector is a major contributor to their economy, not only farmers but everything around it involves a lot of people and businesses. 3) Many countries rely on Danish agricultural exports (it's massive) to ensure people have food.
The Danish agricultural industry accounts for 1% of GDP and almost 70% of land use, the highest in the world. The Wikipedia page on Denmark doesn't even bother to list it as a major industry (unlike Lego) and the only figures I could find put it at around 8B DKK. Lego does 66B DKK on its own.
What criteria are you using?
Lego is not edible. they'll need food in the coming war.
(Dane here) - this is a major reversal on the food-security policy that drove not just innovation in intensive farming technologies in Denmark in the late nineteenth century, but also the formation of what is now the EU, post WWII, on a european scale.
Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
> Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
That's really hilarious: Poland imports it's pork from Denmark.
(ASF and almost no piglets breeding)
> Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
Pole here - Poland switched form being a pork exporter to an importer over the course of the last few decades.
Top external suppliers are...
Denmark (53kt)
Belgium (50kt)
Germany (44kt)
The Netherlands (24.5kt)
Spain (24.5kt)
Our issues in The Netherlands are probably similar to Denmark's and the biggest issue is not all agriculture. Meat and milk production has an outweighed impact on destroying the environment. You need far more land to grow crops to feed livestock and keeping cows leads to a lot of nitrogen deposition.
We can reduce land use and have food security if people were not so intend on eating/drinking animal products every day (and there are perfectly fine vegetarian alternatives).
I believe the insistence on being a major agricultural producer in the EU despite having some of the largest population densities in the region has a lot to do with it.
A huge chunk of that output is purely for export.
> A growing population require food.
Sure, but Europe's not growing. It is purely in "shrink forever" mode. This is easily measured, any time fertility drops below 2.1 that's what happens. But ignore that a moment, what if you wanted to depopulate Europe? This might be a good policy for that. Get the timing just right, and it's not even a genocide... food shortages that don't starve anyone just encourages the last few breeders to put a lid on it, and voila! The fantasy of more than a few out there.
Southern Europe seems to be converting farmland into solar farms. And new forests seem to be all monoculture Eucalyptus, fast growing for commercial reasons, but sadly empty of wildlife.
As much as I'd love for Europe to be reforested, the reduced food security might come back to bite us.
What kinds of forests? For nature, or for lumber? If the latter, what is quality of the timber produced, or will it spark a new wave of power stations burning wood pellets. Lots of questions, with very little detail available in the article.
Anyone know if they plan to chop down the trees when they grow and use the wood somehow, so they can capture more carbon through growing new trees?
Yes, some of the forests will be untouched nature but a good chunk of it will be for timber production.
Awesome, thanks!
In many parts of Europe, forested areas have actually grown since the 20th and especially the 19th century.
People no longer use wood as a fuel, or in very small amounts compared to the past, and some former pastures have been re-colonized by trees.
Czechia is currently 34 per cent forest. Used to be less than 20 per cent in the Theresian cadastre (mid 18-th century).
Indeed. A few years ago I ran across a comparison of old photographs of rural villages (early 20th century) in central Europe vs their present day appearance, taken from similar points of view.
Two things were immediately apparent from the old photographs - less forest - tons of fruit trees
Fitting is also this anecdote I heard when visiting a historical mill. They had a huge linden tree in their yard, and they told us that in the olden days this was a symbol of prosperity, because the original owner showed off that they could afford to plant a useless, non-fruit-bearing - a status symbol.
Coming full circle - the best thing would be if we could plant tons of trees that also produce food - something like the baobabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_digitata . E.g. pigs were fed oak's acorns in fall.
Climate getting milder has also meant the tree line, and thus forest line, has moved up quite a lot[1].
[1]: https://www.forskning.no/norges-forskningsrad-partner-miljoo...
Just open google maps and take a stroll across europe...
Good luck. In the less cohesive Western countries efforts like this are met with both protest by farmers who view their providing calories as almost a sacred task, and by foreign agitprop that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is an attempt at subjugating the people.
> that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is an attempt at subjugating the people
Well, it is. More expensive food means a worse quality of life for normal people. It also means more time spent working to pay for groceries, and less time and money to do things that threaten the elites like accumulating capital or performing activism.
The problem is not production cost, but distribution. A litre of milk is paid at 20c to the producer (never has been cheaper) yet it’s 2€ at the store. The producer makes a few cents on it.
The FoodCo is the one driving price up. Them and consumer behavior.
There’s quite a lot of expensive stuff happening in between filling a tank of milk at the farm, and a consumer purchasing a single bottle at a store near them.
Yes, some necessary (processing, bottling, logistics) some fluff (marketing), and lots of profits.
But the original point was that removing farm capacity will increase consumer prices. Even if doubles farmer prices (to 40c), milk retail prices should only increase by 20c.
Of course, all milk processors (which are a cartel) will double their prices, double their margins, and pitch consumers vs farmers vs ecologists.
21st Century Capitalism.
This is just conjecture without proof, followed by a lazy shot at capitalism. https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism
At the very least, provide some citation that a 20 cent increase in production price would cause a 2 euro increase in consumer price, as you claimed.
Believe me the farmers have been doing their best to buck this.
No they won't. If they started tomorrow planting 100,000 trees a day, and never took a single day off, they would finish up in 2052. What kind of nursery can even grow 100,000 saplings of conifer a day?
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-climate-deniers-pl...
It would take a couple of years at the scale Finnish forest industry is operating.
Large parts of Europe are basically forests that have been temporarily cut down. If you let the land be, the forest will often grow back with minimal effort.
Saplings? Wouldn't it be easier to seed? Or you could plant a few more mature trees sparsely and rely on them to seed?
Didn't Bill Gates once say that planting trees has no impact on global warming?
The trees will ride through floods and reduce water flows, improve species diversity for insects, birds, small mammals, improve temperatures and ameliorate winds, provide shelter for farm animals, can enhance grazing. And there's wood to harvest in due course.
There's a lot more reasons to plant trees than direct AGW offset.
A huge amount of farmland is now surplus to production. Grasses and fields of weeds aren't always ideal. Taking land out of production can also attract offset funding for farmers (-yes, this is a secondary economic outcome and may also incur other costs)
People are healthier around trees. People like trees. Even Bill Gates may actually like trees.
And he’d be right.
When those trees die and then rot or burn, that CO2 will be released right back into the atmosphere. They’ll temporarily hold some, yeah, but it’s like trying to rapidly fire a squirt gun at a fire when someone else is spraying it with a firehose of gasoline.
Especially because trees plant themselves. If they want to set aside the land for forest and seed it a little to get going - great - but those large tree planting operations are a waste of time at best or carbon credit loopholes at worst.
Trees absolutely can help with climate change, although like everything in this universe, there are nuances at play, such as type of tree, location, etc.
We have done a lot of deforestation, and that absolutely has negatively impacted our climate, and we should work to reverse it.
He also once said that 640KB should be enough for anyone, so ... let's take his opinion with a grain of salt. Affluence does not equal wisdom.
He denies it, and even if he said it, it was 1981 and I doubt he meant "forever".
> Affluence does not equal wisdom.
True
Just waiting for someone to factcheck about planting trees: there must be nuance. In australia we burn em to protect people and the environment for example. We have done it for millenia.
You could plant a trillion trees tomorrow but it won't help anything so long as places like China and India pollute the oceans with millions of tones of plastic waste trash every year. That's in the thousands of tones per day region. The sheer scale of pollution there makes Denmark's measly little contribution just that, peanuts. No wonder the farmers are upset. They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
Plastic pollution in the oceans has nothing to do with climate change.