Together in manure approach, not in husbandry policy

While all eyes are on this, LTO Dairy Farming, the NZO and the Animal Protection Association are quietly putting the finishing touches an agreement on the path to a more 'animal-friendly' livestock farming. Where manure is worked together in the G7, LTO is now working on the said piece without these ad hoc friends. LTO even wants to shield from prying eyes. However, this piece is also about (among other things) nitrogen. The plan specifies the steps that dairy farming must take to become more 'animal-friendly'.

Grazing or CO2 reduction?
Obligations include new floors and everyone grazing. The latter, however, is at odds with the desired emission reduction. Stabling results in less emissions into the air and less CO2 yields more milk money, because the dairy industry is paying less and less attention to grazing and, like the rest of the industry, has simply embraced CO2 as a benchmark for the environmental score. And a country like Denmark is doing the same, but more about that later.

No financial paragraph
The agreement in the making (mid-December) does not have a financial paragraph, but the conversion of companies will certainly not be free. Let's hope that the bank will then want to think along - whichever that is these days - and that no new permits will be needed for that. Then, as is known, you will encounter other animal lovers. The dairy industry has already indicated that it does not want to play a role in the possible acquisition of a sector contribution.

Bureaucracy explorer Knops
The Minister of LVVN is not only working with agricultural organisations to reduce the manure problem. She has also put civil servants to work. She has appointed former State Secretary Raymond Knops (CDA) as a 'manure explorer'. He must work with provinces and municipalities to make the bureaucratic mills there run more efficiently, so that more manure processing and other innovations get off the ground that can help solve the manure problem. Whether he will also succeed in weakening the resistance to these kinds of things, remains a question.

The Brabant approach
Especially in North Brabant, the government seems to be looking for every loophole to make things difficult for livestock farms. And sometimes it goes further than that. For example, the province gives its own interpretation of the conditions that apply to buyouts in the context of the LBV termination scheme. Nationally, it applies that livestock farms that are closing down may retain 15% of the original emissions when switching to another activity. Brabant makes that to 15% of. Preferably even less. Many Brabant farmers are upset about this.

Stranger things happen in regional and municipal civil service. For example, non-anonymized company files from the environmental service ended up at MOB, for which a high-ranking official seems to have been tackled in the meantime.

Telegraaf owner sells cattle
The number of people who have stopped in the south is now large, especially in East Brabant and North Limburg. Last week, two well-known companies announced that they were stopping because they were 'peak polluters'. This concerns the farm of the Engelen family, owner of KI Samen, and the dairy farm of the Van Puijenbroek family, major shareholder of the Telegraaf Media Groep.  

Danish farmers into the forest
The agricultural world also reacted with shock this week to the Danish plans to 15% of agricultural land to be converted into forests. Suppose this were also to happen to the Netherlands! With the right (or perhaps better: wrong) political relations, something like this might be possible. Denmark is governed by a social democratic/liberal government. Call it PvdA-VVD.

The Netherlands has already done a lot
Denmark is a very different country, with very little forest, but mainly agricultural land, while the Netherlands has converted a lot of agricultural land into nature in recent years, on top of what was already there. Apart from that, everything in Denmark has been approached in a much less polarizing way, without wild shrinkage plans. Farmers also seem to be properly compensated. However, Denmark was also the first country in the world with a tax on CO2 emissions. What it all means for the agricultural sector is still difficult to estimate.

Brussels dispute settled
In Brussels this week the final steps were also taken towards the creation of the new European Commission. A row had broken out between the left and the new right over the appointment of two vice-presidents and a Hungarian candidate commissioner, but that has now been settled. Both sides made concessions. Soon business can be done again with the Brussels Eurogovernment.