#QuittingCheese

The planet

Globally, 80% of the agricultural land is used for rearing animals. Directly as pasture for cattle, but also indirectly. For instance, to grow the soybean which is used as feed for the animals. In exchange for a higher milkproduction. This means that everything else you eat - except fish - come from the remaining 20% of agricultural land. On top of that, most fields used for cattle (incl. dairy cows), corn and soybean occur in areas with a high nature conservation value. In the Netherlands the balance is 28% arable fields and 33% pasture (958 000 hectare, but actually we need to add quite some Brazilian  soybean-hectares). Globally there is no real opportunity to put more land into agricultural use (until Greenland melts). That explains the omnipresent focus on increasingly higher yields. Of course, not all animal husbandry is used for cheese. There is also meat and milk.

With a greenhouse gas emission rate equalling 11 kg CO₂ per 100 gram protein  cheese is worse for the climate than pork (7.6 kg CO₂ per 100 g protein),  chicken (5.7), and eggs (4.2), but not as bad as a steak (50! - 17 when you butcher dairy cows). Cows fart and the gas contains methane (CH₄) which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂  (84x stronger). The greenhouse gas emission of cheese is also higher than tofu (2.0), peas (0.4), cassave (1.4), potato (0.6) and grain (0.6). The same pattern repeats itself in terms of area of land use (e.g. for cheese 41 m² per year per 100 g protein, steak 164 m²  and tofu 2.2 m²).

Then the manure. The most urgent subject in the Netherlands anno 2024. Cattle produces manure by shitting. And then? Then the farmer spreads the manure over the fields. And if the farmer still has manure left over? Then you go to Brussels to ask for a temporary exemption from the Nitrate Directive, a fine piece of EU regulation from 1991 to protect our drinking and surface waters, that is revoked 20 years later. Then what? Shrinkage. But that we don't dare to ask of the farmers. And then you will be punished. The Supreme Court ruled that the Dutch programme to address the nitrogen crisis, the Programma Aanpak Stikstof, was not tenable and this made that we could no longer build, build, build - and that in the context of a housing shortage of 1 million homes. Meanwhile, the Dutch surface waters are not in a good shape and it is clear that almost none of the cases will we achieve the targets in the Water Framework Directive.

Efficiency

I would like to puncture another myth. The Dutch agricultural system is not efficient. For comparison the nitrogen use efficiency in the Netherlands is on average 37.1%, in Ethiopia it is 85.3% and in Nigeria it is 100%.... And yield? On avergae in the Netherlands: 5.2 t/ha/yr, Ethiopia: 9.3 t/ha/yr, and Nigeria: 14.2 t/ha/yr. So what do you mean with efficient? On top of that, in Ethiopia and Nigeria farming can still be optimized, there is still a yield gap of 1.47 t/ha en 3.05 t/ha, respectively for grains in these countries. The Netherlands has already reached its theoretical maImum yield, the yield gap here is zero.