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”.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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