{"id":729,"date":"2017-09-14T17:20:22","date_gmt":"2017-09-14T09:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.agrinoon.com\/agriculture\/?p=729"},"modified":"2017-09-14T17:20:22","modified_gmt":"2017-09-14T09:20:22","slug":"tiny-country-feeds-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.agrinoon.com\/agriculture\/2017\/09\/14\/tiny-country-feeds-world\/","title":{"rendered":"This tiny country feeds the world"},"content":{"rendered":"
Keywords:\u00a0The Netherlands , farming<\/div>\n
Jacob van den Borne is a Dutch farmer. In a potato field near the Netherlands\u2019 border with Belgium, he is seated in the cabin of an immense harvester before an instrument panel worthy of the starship Enterprise<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
From his perch 10 feet above the ground, he\u2019s monitoring two drones. That is a driverless tractor roaming the fields and a quadcopter in the air. They provide detailed readings on soil chemistry, water content, nutrients, and growth, measuring the progress of every plant down to the individual potato. Van den Borne\u2019s production numbers testify to the power of this \u201cprecision farming,\u201d as it\u2019s known. The global average yield of potatoes per acre is about nine tons. Van den Borne\u2019s fields reliably produce more than 20.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
That copious output is made all the more remarkable by the other side of the balance sheet: inputs. Almost two decades ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry \u201cTwice as much food using half as many resources.\u201d Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by as much as 90 percent. They\u2019ve almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses. And since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by as much as 60 percent.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
One more reason to marvel: The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country. There arec more than 1,300 inhabitants per square mile. It\u2019s bereft of almost every resource long thought to be necessary for large-scale agriculture. Yet it\u2019s the globe\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Seen from the air, the Netherlands resembles no other major food producer. It is a fragmented patchwork of intensely cultivated fields. Most of them are tiny by agribusiness standards, punctuated by bustling cities and suburbs. In the country\u2019s principal farming regions, there\u2019s almost no potato patch, no greenhouse, no hog barn that\u2019s out of sight of skyscrapers, manufacturing plants, or urban sprawl. More than half the nation\u2019s land area is used for agriculture and horticulture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Banks of what appear to be gargantuan mirrors stretch across the countryside. It is glinting when the sun shines and glowing with eerie interior light when night falls. They are Holland\u2019s extraordinary greenhouse complexes, some of them covering 175 acres.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
These climate-controlled farms enable a country located a scant thousand miles from the Arctic Circle to be a global leader in exports of a fair-weather fruit: the tomato. The Dutch are also the world\u2019s top exporter of potatoes and onions. And it is the second largest exporter of vegetables overall in terms of value. More than a third of all global trade in vegetable seeds originates in the Netherlands.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The brain trust behind these astounding numbers is centered at Wageningen University & Research (WUR). WUR located 50 miles southeast of Amsterdam. It is Widely regarded as the world\u2019s top agricultural research institution. \u00a0WUR is the nodal point of Food Valley, an expansive cluster of agricultural technology start-ups and experimental farms. The name is a deliberate allusion to California\u2019s Silicon Valley, with Wageningen emulating the role of Stanford University in its celebrated merger of academia and entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Ernst van den Ende managed director of WUR\u2019s Plant Sciences Group. He embodies Food Valley\u2019s blended approach. A renowned scholar with the casual manner of a barista at a hip caf\u00e9, van den Ende is a world authority on plant pathology. But, he says, \u201cI\u2019m not simply a college dean. Half of me runs Plant Sciences. But the other half oversees nine separate business units involved in commercial contract research.\u201d Only that mix, \u201cthe science-driven in tandem with the market-driven,\u201d he maintains, \u201ccan meet the challenge that lies ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The challenge? Put in bluntly apocalyptic terms, he says, the planet must produce \u201cmore food in the next four decades than all farmers in history have harvested over the past 8,000 years.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
That\u2019s because by 2050, the Earth will be home to as many as 10 billion people, up from today\u2019s 7.5 billion. If massive increases in agricultural yield are not achieved, matched by massive decreases in the use of water and fossil fuels, a billion or more people may face starvation. Hunger could be the 21st century\u2019s most urgent problem. And the visionaries working in Food Valley believe they have found innovative solutions. The wherewithal to stave off catastrophic famine is within reach, van den Ende insists. His optimism rests on feedback from more than a thousand WUR projects in more than 140 countries. And on its formal pacts with governments and universities on six continents to share advances and implement them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Source:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/b>National Geographic<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Keywords:\u00a0The Netherlands , farming Jacob van den Borne is a Dutch farmer. In a potato field near the Netherlands\u2019 border with Belgium, he is seated in the cabin of an immense harvester before an instrument panel worthy of the starship Enterprise. From his perch 10 feet above the ground, he\u2019s monitoring two drones. That is… Continue reading This tiny country feeds the world<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry-news","entry"],"yoast_head":"\nThis tiny country feeds the world - agrinoon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.agrinoon.com\/agriculture\/2017\/09\/14\/tiny-country-feeds-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"This tiny country feeds the world - agrinoon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Keywords:\u00a0The Netherlands , farming Jacob van den Borne is a Dutch farmer. 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