Background nitrogen
'Livestock farming can control emissions itself'
The Dutch livestock industry can meet the emission reduction target in the coming years up to and including 2035, if it uses the innovations that are now known and focuses on the best available techniques. What's more, it can be done while maintaining animal numbers. It does cost around €8 billion in total, but that is less than many other solutions. Finally forming a united front towards the government is also very necessary.
Emission expert and food technologist Wouter de Heij said this at a meeting organised by the Stichting Stikstofclaim (SSC). He said that he was more of a personal person when he said that he was forming a united front, but he was just as sincere. De Heij pointed out that not only are there solutions available, but that a lot has also changed in terms of opportunities for agriculture. He pointed out, among other things, the space to make use of new experimental space that the European Commission offers to get innovations off the ground (Sandbox). According to him, agriculture must fully respond to this. It is something that is diametrically opposed to the approach of the previous cabinet, but it offers many new opportunities. Now promising initiatives, such as the Kopros system, often fail due to high certification costs and bureaucratic unwillingness, while in Switzerland, for example, it has been accepted and proven to work.
Already done a lot
The task for reducing ammonia emissions in particular is considerable, the scientist acknowledges, but since 2019, considerable progress has also been made. For example, the dairy farming sector has already reduced by around 13%, he calculates. But that is not thanks to the government's buy-out schemes. They have yielded little, at high social costs. According to him, other sectors can also achieve the set goals.
Cost-increasing
The agricultural sector does make a sacrifice for this, because every sustainability increases the cost price and society must help with that, because it also benefits from it, according to De Heij. He advises agriculture not to 'hand in' without clarity, but to first get the permit granting going again. Promises from the government to arrange something afterwards have too often not come true.
De Heij is of the opinion that agriculture, and in fact society as a whole, should be freed from the Aerius system that the government is currently working with as soon as possible.
Self-measuring is also an option
The model continually gives a distorted picture, especially at local and regional level, also underestimates the deposition of nitrogen on or the absorption of nitrogen by land by at least a factor of 2 and also provides incorrect pictures of the situation in other areas, due to a lack of observations on site. According to De Heij, satellite observation by the government is more precise and perhaps also cheaper. He also advises the agricultural sector to also make observations themselves. Not with sensors in the barn, but with real measurements, for example of wet deposition around the company. The sector can even set up its own monitoring network. According to him, this can compensate for the lack of measurements by the RIVM and other institutions. At the aforementioned institute, relatively little is measured and more modelling is done. De Heij: "It seems that observations no longer count for much at the RIVM."
Theory beats observation
In doing so, he strikes a similar tone to that of Professor Arthur Petersen, who expresses his surprise that lawyers – albeit from the Council of State – based their decisions on purely legal arguments still express a reservation against an arithmetic lower limit for nitrogen deposition. Here too, theory seems to outweigh measurements.
Agriculture has a problem
De Heij had not come to absolve agriculture, because livestock farming does indeed have an emission problem that needs to be solved, he states. But unlike many others, he believes that it is also solvable, with a different approach than before.
No Stasi approach
De Heij, like the cabinet, is also in favor of a shift from deposition policy to emissions policy, but without Aerius, Critical Deposition Values and other central monitoring systems for agriculture, also without target management. Otherwise, according to him, you get a 'Stasi society', which in principle may be able to trust the entire society, but not agriculture in fact.
Klaas van der Horst
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