For years, the Netherlands has been gripped by a crisis linked to nitrogen emissions from manure, which environmentalists say is destroying the country’s ecosystems. A European Union derogation allowing Dutch farmers to use more manure than their neighboring countries will end next year.
The Netherlands is one of the smallest countries in Europe but, despite its small size, it is the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value, behind only the United States. In 2023, Dutch agricultural exports amounted to 124 billion euros (132 billion dollars), according to the national statistics office. Intensive farming has left this small country with higher levels of nitrogen oxide than EU regulations allow. These emissions worsen climate change and can harm biodiversity.
For over five years, the nitrogen crisis, referred to as the stikstofcrisis in Dutch, has pitted environmentalists, armed with European regulations, against farmer groups and the agri-food industry. Tired of begging for governmental action, environmentalists argued before the European Court of Justice and the Dutch Council of State, the country’s highest court, that the government was not respecting EU rules that require Member States to protect biodiversity.
In May 2019, the Council of State delivered its judgment, kicking off the stikstofcrisis. The court ruled in favor of the environmental groups that brought the case forward, ordering the government to stop issuing permits for nitrogen-emitting projects until it develops a plan to rapidly reduce emissions. Overnight, 18,000 construction projects, including critical infrastructure and housing development projects, were put on hold until a new strategy could be developed.
Dutch farmers took to the streets en masse to protest against the government plan’s objectives to drastically reduce nitrogen emissions, primarily stemming from livestock. This discontent, over a government proposal to meet European Union nitrogen pollution targets through herd reduction, helped propel a new populist political party to first place in provincial elections last year: the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) or Farmer-Citizen Movement.
European Union waiver
In 2020, Dutch farmers obtained a derogation from the EU, allowing them to spread more manure than farmers in neighboring countries, owing to the limited size of their territory. But this exceptional position expires in 2025 and farmers will soon face sanctions if they do not respect the new measures.
Last week, Piet Adema, the current Minister of Agriculture in the outgoing government – still in power due to the lack of coalition – presented to Parliament a set of measures aimed at solving this problem. These include a new billion-euro buyback program for farmers’ land, increased subsidies for grasslands, foods with less protein, and a limit on the maximum number of cows per hectare.
Caroline van der Plas, leader of the BBB agricultural party, said on Monday that it was “unacceptable” that the outgoing government was “suddenly spending billions on a buyout plan.” The outgoing minister recently clarified that he had made several attempts to persuade Brussels to reconsider their stance, all of which were unsuccessful.
When the Dutch government announced plans last May to buy up farms near nature reserves and reduce the country’s livestock by a third, farmers revolted, staging massive protests that destabilized the political landscape of the Netherlands.
A recurring problem
The nitrogen problem is not new, nor is its cause a mystery.
Cows and pigs, which form the basis of the meat and dairy industry in the Netherlands, consume large amounts of soy concentrates, such as soybean meal, imported from countries like the United States and Brazil. The soy is grown with synthetic fertilizers to supply it with nitrogen and phosphorus, essential nutrients upon which the global agricultural system depends.
When livestock eat this soy, some of these nutrients are absorbed into their bodies. However, a greater amount is excreted via manure and urine. When the two mix, they produce ammonia, a gaseous form of nitrogen, which then evaporates into the atmosphere.
By the 1980s, the steady growth of Dutch livestock had generated a cloud of ammonia across the country. Combined with sulfur dioxide emissions from factories, this created acid rain. “You could smell the ammonia, it was a problem for people,” said Roland Bobbink, a Dutch expert in nitrogen deposition science at Radboud University, interviewed by environmental media outlet Mongabay, “so, in the late 1980s, the government launched a mitigation program to control ammonia emissions.”
Government measures included better filters on industrial smokestacks, which significantly reduced sulfur dioxide emissions, as well as technology that helped ranchers separate manure from urine. With these measures reinforced by EU-imposed milk quotas at the time, the number of dairy cows in the Netherlands fell by 600,000 over the next 25 years, cutting nitrogen deposition in the country’s environment by almost half.
14 protected areas at risk
This drop was enough to stop acid rain, but not enough to prevent nitrogen overload in neighboring ecosystems. Ammonia produced by livestock drifts through the air and eventually lands on surfaces within a 20 to 30 km () radius. Over time, it accumulates, particularly in soils, draining vital nutrients and unbalancing the food chains of flora and fauna.
According to a study written by Bobbink and published by Greenpeace in 2022, 118 of the 161 Dutch protected areas were threatened by the weight of nitrogen deposition, with 14 of them in the “final phase before the collapse.”
As Dutch society wakes up to the harsh reality that its environment is unable to sustain its current food system, the “nitrogen crisis,” which appears to be no closer to resolution, raises difficult questions about how to reform unsustainable systems and offers a glimpse of what may lie ahead for other countries.
