Dairy farmers’ interest groups want the government to weaken its set of requirements for agriculture. If not, according to the associations, there will be no broad agricultural agreement between the government and the agricultural sector.
The advocates believe that too much pressure and increased burdens are passed on to farmers, making investments in climate impossible. The main bottlenecks for the farmers’ associations, including the Dutch Dairy Trade Union (NMV), LTO Dairy Farming, Agractie and the Dutch Dairymen Board, are the loss of agricultural land and the space they have to fertilize it.
NMV chairman Henk Bleker calls it “unacceptable” that dairy farming is losing almost a quarter of a million hectares of agricultural land. “The preconditions also mean that large dairy farms will survive and become larger. Traditional family farms will fall victim and we think that is undesirable.” According to Bleker, the conflict is “completely clear” and it is now “up to the minister to bridge the gap.”
The organizations warn that domestic milk production will fall by more than a third due to the package of requirements. And that also has consequences for industry and knowledge and research institutions, they claim. “The global relevance of the dairy chain is largely disappearing.” There will also be a scarcity of land, which will therefore become more expensive, while the government also wants more land per cow. According to the farmers, the targets are therefore not attainable.
The farmers also complain about the requirements regarding the use of artificial fertilizers and the abolition of the derogation rules by the European Union. As a result, farmers here were allowed to use more manure than in other countries. Its abolition costs farmers a lot of money.
They want the government to focus on the goal that needs to be achieved and not the resources that need to be used to achieve it. Less strict rules may then apply to various farms because the environmental problems and pollution of groundwater are not so great there.