The voluntary termination of companies for a generous fee or even outright expropriation. Better prices for farmers who bring organic meat to supermarkets. Compensation for farmers who carry out nature management. They will probably all belong to the tools that Johan Remkes will put on the table on Wednesday to avert the nitrogen crisis. His proposals come after a summer full of talks with all those involved and must bring politicians and farmers back on the same page, so that the Netherlands has halved total nitrogen emissions (not only from agriculture) by 2030.
That is why he will almost certainly also advise focusing on what the farmers see as the ultimate way out: (technological) innovations. In a nitrogen plan from May last year, among others, LTO Nederland and Natuurmonumenten proposed to achieve 64 percent of the nitrogen reduction in agriculture with ‘innovative barn systems, extensification and management measures’. In this way, buy-out – a sensitive measure about which the PBL has its doubts – would become less necessary.
That sound has been around for years. Agricultural organizations have successfully lobbied for millions in subsidies for innovations in recent decades. Research platform Investico calculated last year that the central government has spent 580 million euros on techniques to limit nitrogen emissions since 2009. The provinces of Noord-Brabant, Utrecht and Limburg added another 180 million between 2015 and 2020. No figures are available for the other provinces.
That commitment to innovation has paid off in the past. Between 1990 and 2010, livestock grew by 17 percent, while ammonia precipitation nearly halved, according to figures from Statistics Netherlands and RIVM. ‘That was partly due to technological innovations’, says nitrogen professor Jan Willem Erisman of Leiden University.
Nitrogen and ammonia, emissions and precipitation
The element nitrogen in itself is not harmful to nature, but as soon as it combines with another element, substances are created that are harmful above a certain level. Ammonia, a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, is one of them. In agriculture, no less than 95 percent of nitrogen emissions consist of ammonia. As policy makers When talking about nitrogen reduction in agriculture, they therefore mainly look at ammonia emitted by livestock farming.
What ultimately matters for nature is how much nitrogen precipitates on the ground, in other words the deposition. Keeping livestock close to nature reserves is relatively harmful, because ammonia largely precipitates close to the source.
Even with the innovations, Dutch nature still has to process more nitrogen than it can handle, and in recent years the decrease has even become an increase. In 2020, more than 12 percent more ammonia precipitated on Dutch soil than ten years earlier, according to air measurements of the RIVM. Strangely enough, the ammonia emissions in agriculture ‒ which the RIVM does not measure, but calculates on the basis of often incorrect data provided by farmers ‒ decreased by more than 7 percent in the same period.
The difference between paper and reality has increased in recent years, with the focus on innovative techniques probably being an important cause. ‘With every new technology you see that the results in practice are disappointing,’ says Erisman.
In addition, enforcement is lacking. Farmers get their business expansion permit as soon as they buy an air scrubber or low-emission stable floor, or as soon as they claim to let their cows out to pasture more often. An initial check may take place, but after that the government never visits again to check whether the farmer continues to comply with the regulations.
In addition, nitrogen emissions are just one of the problems facing agriculture. According to many experts, the problems of drought, water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions should be tackled in conjunction with the nitrogen problem. The technological innovations focus on nitrogen emissions.
Herd shrinkage also contributes to solving other problems, and therefore seems inevitable. Certainly in areas where emissions have to be reduced by more than half, buying out farmers who have stopped, relocation or switching to more sustainable agriculture will be necessary, according to Erisman. ‘In areas where the target is only a 10 or 20 percent reduction, this is only possible with innovations,’ he thinks. But then they have to do what they promise.
1 | Less protein-rich foods
It was one of the first plans of the Rutte III cabinet to reduce nitrogen emissions in agriculture: serve less protein-rich feed to livestock. The idea behind it is simple: these proteins mainly consist of nitrogen, so the less of that protein the animals ingest, the less nitrogen they later excrete.
Especially for cattle (responsible for 54 percent of ammonia emissions in agriculture), according to animal feed researcher Jan Dijkstra, a lot can be achieved with this. According to him, dairy farmers can feed 10 percent less protein across the entire menu without a drop in milk production. This could result in an ammonia reduction of up to 15 percent. Dijkstra: ‘The problem is: how do you guarantee that? Every dairy farmer has to register himself what kind of feed he gives, but that is legally not hard enough.’ Fraud involving manure and calves, among other things, shows that some farmers pass on other information.
When the former Minister of Agriculture Carola Schouten proposed setting a legal maximum for the protein content in concentrates, the farmers also objected. A legal maximum would make it impossible to give young calves and pregnant cows, which desperately need the proteins, anything extra. The farmers wanted to give their cattle less protein-rich concentrates, provided they could make exceptions when necessary. This makes it virtually impossible to monitor compliance with this measure.
2 | Air scrubbers
The word speaks for itself: an air scrubber is a device that ‘washes’ the air in a stable, so that ammonia, odor and particulate matter do not end up in the outside air. They do this very effectively: depending on the type – biological, chemical or a combination – an air scrubber can filter 70 to 95 percent of the ammonia from the stable, according to RIVM.
But in 2018 it turned out that a sample of Wageningen University & Research (WUR) on 48 pig farms that combi air scrubbers, which account for about 45 percent of the installed systems, do not filter 85 percent of the ammonia as expected, but only 59 percent. Later that year, almost half of the pig farmers who previously had such a combi air scrubber suddenly gave up having a biological air scrubber, for which the RIVM still calculates with a reduction of 85 percent. Wageningen researchers called it ‘unlikely’ that they had all installed a new system within a year.
Also a research of the province of Overijssel has cast doubt on the sky-high ammonia reduction promised by the air scrubbers. Even after an information campaign about the use of the air scrubbers, the proportion of the devices that work properly remained at a meager 12 percent.
The province attributes the disappointing effectiveness of air scrubbers to a combination of complicated operation and lack of attention from the farmers.
3 | Low-emission stable floors
Ammonia is formed when the poo and pee of cattle come into contact with each other. That is exactly what low-emission barn floors with a combination of slots, gutters, flaps, slides and manure robots prevent. In theory at least.
In practice, farmers complain about slurry robots and scrapers, which mainly spread the faeces over the barn floor, which clogs the flaps and ultimately creates more ammonia. ‘If you don’t slide regularly enough, or if the slides are worn, you achieve the opposite effect,’ explains agricultural engineer Karin Groenestein (WUR).
Groenestein and colleagues concluded that low-emission barn systems for cows do not demonstrably lead to less ammonia emissions than conventional barn floors. Low-emission pig houses filter not 29 to 72 percent ammonia, but 0 to 48 percent. In low-emission chicken houses, the ammonia gain is not between 25 and 89 percent, but between 0 and 78 percent. The Council of State recently confirmed that it is uncertain whether they indeed lead to less ammonia emissions from two commonly used types of low-emission floors.
‘More awareness is needed among farmers about how to use these systems’, thinks Groenestein. ‘It is also difficult: ammonia is a substance that you cannot see. So without meters in the barn you don’t know whether you’re doing it right or not.’
4 | Dilute manure
Ammonia can be released not only in the stable, but also in meadows and fields, especially when applying manure. ‘On organic dairy farms, the share of field emissions is more than half,’ explains agricultural researcher Gerard Migchels (WUR). ‘On intensive dairy farms (where the animals often stay indoors, red.) more than half of the emissions are actually stable emissions.’
Practical research by Migchels and colleagues shows that farmers on clay and peat soils (45 and 9 percent of the Dutch agricultural area, respectively) can prevent about 35 percent of these field emissions by diluting manure with water before spreading. On sandy soil (44 percent of the acreage), the researchers observed no clear difference after diluting manure.
Since 2019, the application of undiluted manure to clay and peat with a trailing foot fertiliser, which does not apply the manure in but on the ground, has been prohibited. Farmers are only allowed to apply diluted manure or use a sod fertiliser, which applies the manure in slots in the ground. However, the government hardly enforces that rule.
In principle, diluting manure on clay and peat soils is therefore a promising measure, but enforcement is not yet finished. Migchels: ‘A lot of the spreading is done by contractors who have flow meters. They use this to keep track of how much manure they pump and how much water they add. You could enforce based on that data. But for farmers who spread their manure themselves, such a flow meter is very expensive. ‘
5 | Cows in the meadow more often
At 17 percent of the dairy farms, the cows are kept in stables all year round. But a cow that always stays in the barn poops and pees in the same place. And that’s when ammonia is created. The solution seems simple: let the cows walk outside. Then they do their defecation in a different place each time, and less ammonia is released.
If farmers let their cows out for 720 hours a year (the standard for a ‘meadow premium’ on the milk price), this results in research of the WUR an emission reduction of 5 percent. It previous cabinet considered That is why it is already necessary to grant subsidies for more grazing of cows.
It is just not easy to check exactly how many hours per year cows are outside. So here too, farmers have some room to pass on favorable figures. In theory, the government could calculate how much grass the cows have eaten, and thus how long they have been outside, based on the quantities of animal feed purchased and the milk production. ‘But that formula assumes that cows eat grass all the time when they are outside,’ says Migchels. ‘Another promising idea is a CO2 meter in the barn.’
According to nitrogen professor Erisman, certification and agreements about sharing data are essential for all such measuring equipment. ‘Fraud is always possible, but you have to minimize it.’