A face-off with Brussels will kill half a million Dutch dairy cows unless the Netherlands can this year contain the mountains of manure they produce.
The massive quantity of dung is a problem because it releases too much phosphate, which contaminates groundwater, and the only realistic response is to cull the culprits. A lucky few cows could be sold abroad.
A cull of this scale would wipe out about a third of the 1.5 million cows in the country — a major blow to Dutch farmers, who are the EU’s fourth-largest milk producers. They generated some €12 billion for the Dutch economy in 2014.
The drastic predicament arose because of an exemption that the Netherlands won from EU environmental rules in 2006 and that expires December 31 if Brussels refuses to renew it. The Dutch secured a derogation from the bloc’s nitrate rules allowing them to spread more manure than other European farmers. This was designed to account for Dutch agriculture’s high intensity: The sector can use more nitrates because, proportionally, it produces more per hectare.
But Brussels only allowed these higher nitrate levels on the condition that farmers limit the amount of phosphates they apply on fields.
The Netherlands blew through this cap for several years running after the size of the dairy sector soared when milk production quotas ended in 2015. Koert Verkerk, from the Dutch farmers’ lobby LTO, said that the Netherlands surpassed its phosphate limits between 2008 and 2010, and again between 2014 and 2016. He attributed the recent infraction to a surge in cow numbers.
“When the milk quota disappeared they knew what the consequences would be and they didn’t do a thing,” said Friends of the Earth Netherlands campaigner Bart van Opzeeland, referring to the Dutch government.
Dutch farmers now fear Brussels will refuse to renew the exemption unless they reduce phosphate levels. If this happens they will have to remove some 500,000 cows from the herd to comply with the bloc’s regular nitrate rules.
Yet the proposed solution is almost as traumatic: Kill or sell some 200,000 dairy cows this year so that the national herd emits fewer phosphates.
“There is no winner,” Van Opzeeland said. “It’s a problem for the farmers but also for almost 200,000 cows who will probably die.”
Many are furious at the various politicians and experts who they say failed to foresee that the end of milk quotas would cook up phosphate trouble.
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“In 2006 we knew that we had a phosphate ceiling, in 2008 … we knew that milk quotas would end,” Dutch Liberal MEP Jan Huitema said.”In a way, we all in the Netherlands did not act appropriately.”
Verkerk agreed: “Farmers are also angry at us because we let it happen as well — and in a sense they’re right.”
The government was well aware that it had to cut phosphate levels, however, and last year haggled with the European Commission to institute a system of so-called phosphate rights — or tradeable phosphate-production certificates. The Commission rejected the policy in October, citing state-aid rules on illegal government support.
The Dutch government declined to comment.
“He shouldn’t have let it happen. It’s unbelievable that it happened,” Verkerk said of Dutch Agriculture Minister Martijn van Dam, who added that the minister should have done more.
Recognizing that it was facing a calamity, the dairy sector late last year proposed its own solution: Feed companies volunteered to cut phosphate levels in their products, while milk processors suggested penalizing farmers who produced over a certain limit.
The government then stepped in with a €25 million fund to incentivize slaughter or exports, to which the dairy sector added another €25 million.
To work, the scheme must remove some 200,000 thousand cows.
Verkerk and Van Opzeeland insisted the plan would work and that the Commission would extend the derogation, pointing out that everyone in the sector understood the stakes.
But paradoxically — for dairy farmers who have longed for better prices since the dairy market’s collapse in 2014 — a now-rising milk price may well throw a wrench in the works.
“With the milk prices rising again, farmers are not reducing their herd numbers,” Verkerk said. “From an entrepreneurial point of view, very understandable, but from the collective, it’s disastrous.”