Dutch Agriculture
Ethan Sullivan
| 07-06-2024
· Lifestyle Team
The Netherlands is well-known for its agriculture, with its achievements in facility agriculture, flower industry, scientific and technological innovation, contract farming, and large-scale operation.
These have contributed to making the Dutch agriculture system one of the most advanced and efficient in the world.
To break through the resource bottleneck, the Dutch have invested heavily in facility agriculture. The scarcity of land resources and lack of light have been serious constraints on agricultural production.
However, the Dutch have relied on world-leading glass greenhouse technology to establish a world-class facility agriculture system.
The Netherlands has approximately 11,000 hectares of glass greenhouses, accounting for around 25% of the total area of greenhouses in the world.
The greenhouses are equipped with advanced technologies that significantly improve light transmission, reduce the weight of greenhouse construction materials, and increase the wind and pressure resistance of the greenhouses, thus reducing energy consumption.
The Dutch flower industry is renowned worldwide, and the Netherlands is known as the "Garden of Europe" and the "Kingdom of Flowers."
Although many countries have a flower industry, none have made it a large industry like the Netherlands, where the annual export scale reaches several billion dollars, and tourists from around the world come to enjoy the flowers.
The main reason for this is that the Netherlands regards the flower industry as a core strength and has adopted a boutique industrial development strategy.
The Dutch have also focused on scientific and technological innovation to accumulate development potential.
In terms of breeding, they collect germplasm resources from around the world and carry out cross-breeding work. They select single plants with excellent traits and breed them in small quantities to form a strain. In terms of cultivation, the same strain is numbered and cultivated in a variety of resource beds, and then the strain is selected according to its performance, market potential, and other aspects.
The selected new variety is named and applied for a variety.
They rely on advanced agronomic technology, greenhouse technology, and water and fertilizer technology to continuously improve production efficiency and achieve an exponential increase in production value per square meter of land.
In terms of distribution, they use efficient and fast "Dutch-style auctions" and rely on advanced Internet of Things technology to enable flowers that have been traded to be dispatched within a day and shipped to the rest of the world.
To avoid market risks, the Dutch have developed order agriculture. Order farming, also known as contract farming or contract farming, refers to agricultural product ordering contracts and agreements.
One party to the contract is an enterprise or intermediary organization, including brokers and shipping and marketing households; the other party is a farmer or a representative of a farmer group.
The order stipulates the quantity, quality, and minimum protection price of the agricultural products to be purchased so that both parties enjoy the corresponding rights, obligations, and binding force and cannot unilaterally break the contract.
Order farming enables agricultural products to be marketed well in advance of production, avoiding to a certain extent the risks associated with price fluctuations and changes in market supply and demand.
Flowers and vegetables in the Netherlands are usually produced in greenhouses, which are of high value and cost and are significantly affected by market risks. Therefore, most Dutch farms take order production.
Lastly, the Dutch have relied on family farms to promote large-scale operations.
The scale of Dutch farms is the result of market competition, as Dutch farmers have to compete with agricultural producers worldwide.
The mechanism of "elimination of the best and the worst" has resulted in a decrease in the number of farms, but an increase in scale and specialization.
This has further increased the productivity of Dutch agricultural labor and continued to enhance international competitiveness.
The Dutch agriculture system's achievements in facility agriculture, flower industry, scientific and technological innovation, contract farming, and large-scale operation have made it one of the most advanced and efficient in the world.