For a fifth-generation dairy farmer to start protesting against the government, he had to feel like his life was in danger. In western Holland, 120 cows are raised by Bart Kooijman on 50 hectares of land. If the government goes ahead with plans to cut nitrogen emissions from farms in half by 2030, his farm could be one of thousands that will have to get smaller or shut down.
In an effort to calm angry farmers who burned hay bales and dumped manure on highways during the summer, the government announced in November that it would buy out as many as 3000 of the biggest polluters in a one-time, voluntary offer. It set aside €24.3 billion ($38.3 billion) to pay for the transition. Those who don’t agree will have to close their businesses.
Kooijman, a father of two, says, “We don’t want to start fires or block roads, but if we do nothing, it’s over.” “We’ll just have to leave the land.”
The Netherlands’ biodiversity has been destroyed by intensive farming and decades of inaction by the government. This has forced the government to take drastic steps. But the Dutch crisis is a lesson for governments all over the world as a year of record drought, floods, and fires forces us to think about how we make food, the most important thing we make.
Agriculture is a big cause of climate change, even though it is one of the biggest victims of more extreme weather. From the farm to the table, the food system is responsible for about 31% of all greenhouse gas emissions around the world.
By digesting their food, cows and sheep give off methane, which warms the planet. Their manure and urine contain nitrogen oxide, which, in large amounts, throws ecosystems out of balance. Too many fertilisers and pesticides are poisoning soils and water, and farmers are clearing ever-larger areas of rainforest for cattle or monoculture, destroying complex systems that protect wildlife and keep the Earth’s temperature stable.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says that emissions from agriculture went up 14% between 2000 and 2018. Researchers say that if nothing is done soon, food-related emissions alone would cause the Earth to warm by 1.5C more than what world leaders agreed to in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
So, after putting most of their attention on fossil fuels for years, policymakers are now starting to look at farming as well.
In December, the most important meeting on biodiversity in a decade took place in Montreal. It came after the UN-sponsored climate talks in November, where agriculture was talked about for one day of the two-week programme. More than 150 countries have now agreed to cut methane emissions by 30% by the end of the decade. This event built on the 2021 summit in Glasgow.
Climate action is being fought back against by rebel farmers all over the world.
In July, farmers in Gaarkeuken, in the northern Netherlands, block a drawbridge over a canal so that no ships can pass. AP
Some of the most powerful agricultural countries in the developed world are putting out bold new plans to reach this goal. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said this would be the first time anywhere in the world that agricultural emissions would be taxed. New Zealand is the largest exporter of dairy products. Before 2030, Irish farmers should be able to cut their emissions by a quarter. Denmark wants its farming and logging industries to cut their emissions by up to 65%.
Agriculture, on the other hand, could be harder to deal with politically than industries like mining, energy, or cars, which are run by a small number of big corporations. There are millions of farmers, and some of them have small farms that have been in their families for generations. This gives them a connection to the land and to farming that goes beyond making money.
Rising prices for food, fuel, and fertiliser are already making people unhappy. In 2022, Polish and Greek farmers drove tractors to their capitals to voice their complaints. Protests all over Europe were held in support of Dutch farmers.
A tracker made by the political risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft shows that farmer protests are on the rise around the world. In Europe, they are up 30% from 2021, and they are expected to keep growing in the coming months and years because of inflation, drought, and stricter environmental regulations.
Agriculture is a big part of many countries’ exports, but people also need food, and what we eat is often tied to our history and sense of who we are. It has more political weight than many other issues.
Because of this, the Dutch standoff has gotten a lot of attention around the world. This has put farmers in the middle of a global culture war, with vegan activists calling them “monsters” and right-wing groups opposing government regulations on everything from COVID to climate calling them “heroes.”
A farmer in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine looks at his field that is on fire because of the fighting. AP
A farmer in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine looks at his field that is on fire because of the fighting. AP
Even Donald Trump, who used to be president of the US, used them to get his ideas across. At a rally in July, he said, “Farmers in the Netherlands, of all places, are bravely standing up to the Dutch government’s climate tyranny.”
Activists who use the hashtag #NoFarmersNoFood on Twitter have tapped into an old fear: that putting environmental protections in place will stop the world from making enough food for a growing population. By driving up the price of grains and fertilisers, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already made people worry about not having enough food. Farmers are now saying the same thing, saying that climate-related regulations will mean less food and higher prices at the grocery store for people who are already dealing with the worst inflation in decades.
The debate has made the gap between people who live in rural areas and people who live in cities even bigger, turning an old political divide into a cultural chasm. When the Dutch town of Haarlem banned advertising meat because modern livestock farming has a big effect on the climate, some farmers saw it as another part of a larger campaign that could eventually put an end to their way of life.
Farmers are “normal people, but they feel like they’re being treated like criminals. Caroline van der Plas, the leader of the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement, which exploded onto the Dutch political scene in 2019, says that farmers are bad because they spray poison, pollute the environment, and mistreat animals. “They feel undervalued and have nowhere to grow or develop their business. They are very worried about their future.”
But Dhanush Dinesh, the founder of Clim-Eat, a think tank in Utrecht, says that the idea that climate policies will lead to food shortages is “a misconception.” He says that most of the world’s efforts have been focused on solutions like finding better ways to manage soil and water and changing a food production system that wastes food.
About a third of the food that is grown or raised never gets eaten. Livestock are raised and fed on a lot more land than crops that people eat. And governments are pushing for healthier and more sustainable diets not just because they are worried about the environment, but also because obesity and disease are on the rise.
A robot picking crops at a US vertical farm Spencer Lowell/Plenty/AP via Walmart/Courtesy of
A robot picking crops at a US vertical farm Spencer Lowell/Plenty/AP via Walmart/Courtesy of
Dinesh says that the climate crisis needs specific solutions, such as reducing the amount of meat we eat, finding other sources of protein, and using vertical farming. The problem is that farmers don’t always have a say in how policies are made.
“Climate policies need to be made more gradually and with more people in mind,” he says. “The most important thing is to figure out how to work better with farmers and meet their needs.”
On a bright October morning, about 18,000 kilometres from the Netherlands, farm trucks with signs that said “No Farmers, No Food” and “No Fart Tax” drove into Wellington, New Zealand, while the Twisted Sister song “We’re Not Gonna Take It” played over loudspeakers. About 30 cars drove to parliament to protest the government’s policy on climate change.
Almost half of New Zealand’s export income and half of its greenhouse gas emissions come from farming. It passed a law in 2019 that aims to cut net agricultural emissions by 24% by 2050. When the emissions levy goes into effect in three years, farmers must cut their emissions by 10%.
Government forecasters think that the amount of land used to raise lamb, beef, and dairy will go down, and that land will be turned into forests and sold for money through carbon credits. The so-called “fart tax” will be put back into the industry through incentives, research, and technology. This will help New Zealand reposition itself as a leader in ethically produced, higher-value food, a growing market as people become more concerned about the environment and their health.
Start-ups are racing to create new technologies like seaweed-based pellets that reduce emissions, but farmers are frustrated because, for now, the only realistic way to meet the targets is to reduce herd sizes.
Bryce McKenzie is a dairy farmer in Otago on the South Island. In the past year, he has cut his herd of 700 cows by 50, but that isn’t enough. He helped start Groundswell NZ, the fringe farmers group that organised the protests, two years ago, after losing hope that the government’s much-touted partnership with big agricultural lobby groups could save the sector.
McKenzie says, “We don’t want a country full of pine trees that can’t grow food.” “We want to be able to eat in the future.”
Other places have more cautious governments. In Ireland, where farming makes up about a third of greenhouse gas emissions, farmers are expected to cut their emissions by 25%, compared to targets of 75% for electricity and 50% for transportation. So far, Australia has ruled out new taxes and reducing the number of animals it owns. Instead, it is focusing on better ways to manage the environment.
In the European Union, some plans have been put on hold for now because of rising energy and food costs. Tim Rees, a meat industry consultant at Euromonitor International, calls the idea of a meat tax a “political hot potato.” In the past, the idea of a meat tax was hotly debated.
Farmers in New Zealand drive through Warkworth as part of a protest against policies to cut emissions. Warkworth is near Auckland. Getty
Farmers in New Zealand drive through Warkworth as part of a protest against policies to cut emissions. Warkworth is near Auckland. Getty
The Global Alliance for the Future of Food says that so far, only 3% of all money spent on climate change has gone into food systems.
Farmers, consumers, and policymakers all have to deal with the fact that time is running out. In the last 50 years, the number of weather-related disasters has gone up by a factor of five. Last year, climate change made it worse for floods to cover large parts of Pakistan and for drought to burn crops from the US to Brazil.
Chuck Fossay has been farming outside of Winnipeg, Manitoba, for more than 50 years. On his piece of the Canadian prairies, he has seen bad weather happen more often. Last year, drought made his wheat and canola plants much smaller than they would have been otherwise. Heavy rains this year flooded some of his fields. At the same time, growing seasons are longer, and the first frost doesn’t come until the end of September.
Fossay grew corn for the first time in 2007. Back in the 1970s, he wouldn’t have even tried. But rules about the climate are making him worry even more.
This year, Fossay paid 7.7 Canadian cents ($0.06) more per litre to fuel his grain dryer because of Canada’s carbon tax. Federal goals to cut nitrogen emissions by 30% on a voluntary basis could make things even tighter. Farmer groups think that lost production will cost them $8 billion over the next 10 years.
Fossay is part of a pilot programme that tries to get farmers to use fertiliser that is more effective. Even though he can get up to $C4,400 in rebates for his canola acres, the extra fertiliser costs $C3.7 per acre and would cost $C13,300 to use on his whole farm.
Fossay farms with his brothers on land that has been in the family since the early 1900s. He says, “We’re asked to do something that will help everyone, but we’re the ones who have to pay for it.” “We have to do what we can, but what we do has to be fair and doable.”
The Netherlands is the second-biggest exporter of agricultural goods in the world, after the US, but it is smaller than the state of West Virginia. It is a good example of what happens when climate action is put off. It is able to do this in part because it has more animals per hectare than any other European country.
Large parts of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest have been burned because farmers cleared the land to grow crops. AP
A lot of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has been burned down because farmers cleared the land to grow crops.
Before, the government didn’t do what the European Union wanted to protect the environment, in part because of worries about the economic and political effects. Nitrogen pollution is so bad because of this inaction that it is threatening whole ecosystems. To protect EU-protected natural habitats, the Dutch courts have even put limits on building and other things.
One of Holland’s largest nature reserves, De Hoge Veluwe National Park, which is more than an hour’s drive east of Kooijman’s farm, is in danger of losing species at a rate that could be very bad. Nitrogen that seeps into the soil from nearby farms is making some plants grow too fast while depriving others of the calcium they need to stay healthy. The balance of nutrients is so off that snails are having trouble making shells. Even Veluwe’s oak trees are sick. The main cause is animal waste, especially cow urine.
To help bring things back into balance, farms have to cut their emissions by as much as 70%. The rules are stricter for farms that are close to one of the 160 protected natural areas in the country. To meet them, the total number of animals needs to go down by a third. If the government gets its way, the biggest polluters will be shut down by this time next year.
Dutch farmers see the plans as an attempt by the government to take over their land, and some have already started to protest again. Ecologists say that the only way to make sure we can keep making enough food in the decades to come is to act now.
Wieger Wamelink, a researcher at Wageningen University who did a study at the Veluwe reserve, says, “They couldn’t wait.” “Because by then, probably a lot of trees will have died, and you’ll be talking about an ecosystem collapse.”
