On the news site NU.nl there was an interview with a poultry farmer from Brabant on Sunday. A farmer’s business plans have become a matter of national interest, so I immediately started reading.
The poultry farmer said that he keeps 100 thousand chickens and that he may be one of the peak loaders based on the advice of Johan Remkes. When asked whether the poultry farmer would like to be bought out, he replied: ‘If there is a really good offer, it could be interesting.’ After thinking about it for a while, he came back to that: ‘I want to start raising chickens again, and I don’t really want to leave here at all.’
After the infamous nitrogen ticket was announced, there was a lot of sympathy for the farmers because of the visionless government policy of recent years. The changing regulations, the tolerance or not of exceeding standards, the juggling with emission rights; any entrepreneur would go crazy.
However, a large-scale farmer has little in common with the average entrepreneur. An average entrepreneur cannot claim a buy-out scheme in which 100 percent of the market value is reimbursed. An average entrepreneur is left behind when his or her future plans go up in smoke due to changes in society. Just ask all those small farmers who have been crushed by today’s large-scale farms.
Last week, Plantise, one of the largest plant breeders in the Netherlands, announced that it would have to close. A series of price increases, from wage costs to energy prices, are to blame for this. About 400 people will lose their jobs as a result. Losing your job or company is so drastic that the consequences of this event are sometimes described as a grieving process. I looked on CBS’s StatLine to see how many people this is happening to, and there I saw in a table that 18,200 men and women were forced to lay off in 2020. In the same year, 3,632 companies went defunct.
The focus on the despair of farmers is justified. It is terrible when you are told that you have to look for another job. In contrast to all those other companies and employees, the farmers receive a buy-out arrangement from the general resources, a solution that we support together. We’re not talking about a band-aid that will last you only a few months; peak loaders concern companies with a serious market value that must be compensated.
In recent months, the emphasis has shifted to nitrogen. But the next headache file is already waiting: our water management. Large farms also play a role in this. Over-fertilization and crop protection products lead to water pollution, while keeping the groundwater level artificially low in favor of agriculture causes drought.
And then we have that scary word zoonosis. This does not only concern an exotic animal market in Wuhan, a chicken shed with 100 thousand animals also poses risks. The bird flu virus is now around all year round, despite the strictest hygiene regulations imaginable and the preventive culling of millions of animals. The bird flu virus has evolved into a variant that spreads between different bird species, and no one knows how it will develop further.
Keeping production assets that happen to have a beating heart on an industrial scale has a disruptive impact on our future. In doing so, we are at the mercy of a professional group that apparently sees only one destiny in its existence. Fortunately, large, profitable companies often put the common good first, so those innovative farmers are sure to get it all straightened out. If not, we can always say: ‘But we did have a lot of exports.’