The Netherlands have yielded more corps per square acre than some of the top agriculture-export countries despite having less arable land. They don’t have the usual affordances that are typical for large scale agriculture.
“Yet it’s the globe’s number two exporter of food as measured by value, second only to the United States, which has 270 times its landmass. How on Earth have the Dutch done it?”
Part of their success is wide scale deployment of greenhouses. Climate control, water usage, soil monitoring — all together allowed for the Dutch to grow crops year round, using significantly less water and pesticides.
The water usage is particularly interesting. A tomato farmer described using less than four gallons of water, compared with 16 in open fields:
The only irrigation source is rainwater, says Ted, who manages the cultivation program. Each kilogram of tomatoes from his fiber-rooted plants requires less than four gallons of water, compared with 16 gallons for plants in open fields. Once each year the entire crop is regrown from seeds, and the old vines are processed to make packaging crates. The few pests that manage to enter the Duijvestijn greenhouses are greeted by a ravenous army of defenders such as the fierce Phytoseiulus persimilis, a predatory mite that shows no interest in tomatoes but gorges itself on hundreds of destructive spider mites
The View From My Computer
My hope would be that farmers sick of their crops flooded by ongoing climate change related storms or drought-stricken stretches would invest in greenhouses like the Dutch. Also that state and federal government would provide generous subsidies and tax incentives to kickstart greenhouse investments as a part of the climate economy
Probably not
Alas, the agriculture sector is stubbornly trapped in the industrial framing practices as such capital investments and innovations would be met with grumbling that it would be too high of a cost. Absent of federal reform of the FARM Act, the major agriculture legislation due in reauthorization every several years, is very unlikely any major ag-businesses would take up lessons from the Dutch.
Riped for Disruption
Maybe a plunky startup will come around that merges solutions around climate change, food shortage and profitability such that they’ll disrupt the entire industrial-farming model.