I happen to come from a farm family.
Just a fact. I don't claim it gives me any special virtue.
But it may explain why I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the farmers’ protests in Europe. And last weekend’s EU election results.
The Netherlands
For anyone with even a passing interest in agriculture, the Netherlands is a wonder:
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The entire country is just a bit larger than the state of Maryland.
Yet the dollar value of its agricultural exports are second in the world, behind only those of the U.S.
That means larger than China. And Russia. And Ukraine.
The Netherlands has 24,000 acres of area — two Manhattans — under greenhouses.
Which grow, for just one example, a million tons of tomatoes each year.
Those tomatoes, when exported, bring $2 billion into the country.
Since 1995, the volume of Dutch crop and animal agricultural production has grown 20%.
With less fertilizer.
One might be tempted conclude that those Dutch farmers know what they are doing.
No so fast.
Brussels, apparently, knows better.
Brussels
It’s easy to poke fun at EU bureaucrats and technocrats, aka ‘Eurocrats’.
Too much like shooting fish in a barrel.
"Brussels," writes David Zaruk, who spent years there, is "a town where nobody works."
"Sure," Zaruk continues. "People go to conferences, click on clever PowerPoints and meet for coffees to strengthen their networks, look busy writing emails and may contribute to a paper or two if they can get a consensus in their organisation."
"But by work, I mean actually make something.”
“Where,” Zaruk asks, “are the people who wake up in the morning and go to work for a company that makes things, sells goods or services, invests, takes risks, innovates and tries to grow, hire people and add value to the economy?"
"I don’t see such people in the Brussels Bubble," he concludes, "and this is troubling."
"I don’t mean to offend them." Zaruk adds, by way of apology. "These are very smart people who figured out that attending conferences and meeting for coffees is more agreeable (and better paid) than physical labour or entrepreneurial risk-taking."
For European farmers, it’s been less amusing to have the young urbanites of Brussels tell you how to do your job.
The EU’s myriad rules, regulations and restrictions on farming have proliferated like kudzu.
Given that land is the primary asset of most farmers, you might think you could just sit back and trust them to take care of it.
Not by the micromanagers of Brussels, who feel compelled to regulate tillage, cover crops, fertilizer use, you name it.
These are rules written by people who have never grown a carrot.
Let alone raised a farm animal or (look away, children) butchered one for meat.
The urbanites know food comes from grocery stores, usually wrapped in plastic.
And they took some ecology classes in college.
So they know better.
And they are very righteous in their eco-zeal.
Very righteous indeed.
When we think about European politics, we tend to think liberal democracy.
I think that’s a mistake. Better to think theocracy.
Or competing theocracies.
Which gets to that singular virulence in European politics which seems so foreign — and not a little discomforting — to Americans.
A phrase now being used in Germany is Weimarer Verhältnisse — Weimar conditions.
Anyone familiar with European history should to do a double-take upon hearing that.
The Green theocracy has shown itself to be about as tolerant as the Islamic one in Iran.
Just a different religion. Call it ‘ecologism’.
The core tenant of ecologism is simple: Human agency has harmful consequences on the natural world.
Inevitably.
Ergo, Nature must be protected from humans.
Ecologism was a child of the 1960s.
It the politics of the recent decades, it has agglomerated some strange bedfellows.
There’s an older generation still in power after all these years.
Call these the former flower children.
Frans Timmermans, the Dutch politician and architect of the European Green Deal, was born in 1961, the year before Silent Spring appeared.
Johan Vollenbroek, the Dutch activist whose 2019 law case brought on the stikstofcrisis -- 'nitrogen crisis' -- is 74.
Back in the day, Ecologism tapped into Neo-Mathusianism.
As an ecosystem, Planet Earth was fast approaching its carrying capacity for homo sapiens. All those people. Impossible to feed them.
Vollenbroek’s still got it — as they say of certain older Broadway stars. A 2023 quote: “From a purely biological point of view, you could consider mankind as a kind of fungus covering the Earth.”
A corollary of ecologism, the precautionary principle, gives it appeal to younger generations.
They were raised to be afraid of everything. Most recently, of course, global warming.
The precautionary principle sounds sensible in theory.
In application, it’s has proven to be one of the most pernicious doctrines of modern times.
The precautionary principle reverses the conventional burden of proof.
Rather than prove that something is in actually a hazard, it must be proved safe. If there is any uncertainty, we must take the precaution.
Post-Modern epistemology rules that out. Try proving anything to the satisfaction of Twitter users.
Generation Z, apparently, trusts no one.
The precautionary principle is a great excuse for slacking. If there’s doubt, do nothing.
Can you prove with 100% certainty the nuclear reactor won’t melt down?
If not, better not to build it.
Taking the precaution, like anesthesia, is painless.
What economists call ‘opportunity costs’ are not felt in the present.
They only show up in the future.
Following the precautionary principle and doing nothing is a luxury of those currently leading comfortable lives.
Speaking of Europe.
The risk-takers have migrated to developing parts of the globe.
If you believe in the precautionary principle zealously enough — and happen to have the power to write regulations — you will make sure others don’t do anything either.
For humans, doing nothing about food is sadly not an option, so it means doing a lot less.
In farming, this ideology is called Agroecology.
Agroecology mashes up a lot of environmental notions. Most first became au courant in the 1970s:
‘Natural’ is good. ‘Synthetic’ is bad.
Farmers put way too much fertilizer on their fields, which leads to nitrogen and phosphates working their way into rivers and streams.
Farmers drench their crops with pesticides.
Farming increases greenhouse gas emissions. Those tractors run on diesel, right? That growing plants capture CO₂ and that whole carbon cycle thing is way too technical.
Land and nature are best off left alone. Humans are presumptuous in thinking they have a right to manage them.
People should eat less meat. And be kind to animals.
The EU’s plan for agriculture has a cute name, “Farm2Fork.”
And a lot of radical goals for 2030:
reducing synthetic pesticide use by 50%
increase the land area used for organic farming by 25%
cut fertilizer use by 20%
reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by 50%
Future farming in the EU sounds oddly medieval.
In a normal political system, an ambitious piece of legislation like Farm2Fork would get debated.
Legislators would want assessments from respected scientific and budgetary entities to better inform their thinking.
The EU is not a normal political system.
Its agriculture policy is being written by Green NGOs. I’ll get to that.
Farm2Fork weaseled out of an economic assessment on a technicality.
Except the EU Joint Research Centre (JRC) went ahead and did one anyway, on its own.
The JRC found Farm2Fork will reduce yields on some crops by 30%. Overall, European agricultural production will decline around 15%.
That shortfall in domestic production will have to be made up by imports.
So add that to the balance of trade.
Food prices, already high, will go higher.
Of course, Europeans may see the light and change their dietary habits. That’s actually one of Farm2Fork’s goals.
They could eat less meat.
Or just end up having less to eat.
After the farmers’ protests early this year, the politicians took notice.
A few of the rules EU were rolled back in March 2023.
But a question to ask is: Why does Brussels feels so compelled to write so many rules in the first place?
Farmers invest a lot of time studying up on ‘best practices’.
In the US, nearly every state college system has an Agriculture Extension. Advice is free. Services like soil testing are at cost.
But every farm, indeed every field, can be different, so decisions take some thinking on the ground. So to speak.
The message the farmers got from Brussels was very clear: they can’t be trusted to make good decisions.
The alternative message was, they’re just plain stupid. So thry need to be told what to do.
The political coup by which the eco-zealots came to power in the EU is an odd tale.
The cuckoos were invited into the nest.
In the late 1980s, the EU started getting complaints about its ‘openness’, or lack thereof.
A resolution of a 2001 paper on European Governance was, in good bureaucracy-speak, to involve more ‘stakeholders’.
David Zaruk describes what happened next: “The first thing the environmental NGO stakeholders did when they were invited to come to the policy table was kick other stakeholders out of the room.”
When the cuckoo's eggs hatch, the baby cuckoos push the eggs of the other bird out the nest.
One useful trick was for the NGOs to howl loudly about conflict of interest.
Which eliminated anyone who had any knowledge of the agricultural industry from the inside.
Greenpeace, for example, once demanded the European Parliament Agricultural Committee (AGRI) be reconstituted because it could ‘link’ 55% of its members to the agriculture industry.
Witch-hunting is the blood sport of the righteous.
It gets weirder. The EU and its member states funded, with millions of euros, those same NGOs.
The EU was paying the NGOs to lobby it.
I like this poster from the 1950s:
Chemophobia is the irrational fear of chemicals, especially synthetic ones.
Pesticides, like radiation, need not be feared, but should command some respect.
The organic food industry has grown into a $177 billion business on the basis of a simple — but highly effective — marketing ploy. It’s made consumers afraid of conventionally farmed produce.
Produce is low-margin, but the organic certification side business is exceptionally profitable.
On pesticide residues, I like to quote Bruce Ames, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the U.C. Berkeley and senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute.
Ames said what follows in an interview by Reason magazine a while back. I’ve edited it for continuity:
All the world is natural chemicals. A cup of coffee is filled with chemicals. They've identified a thousand chemicals in a cup of coffee. Twenty-two out of that thousand have been tested in animal cancer tests. Of the 22 that have been tested, 17 are carcinogens. That works out to 10 milligrams of known carcinogens in a cup of coffee. More carcinogens then you're likely to get from pesticide residues in a year. We also eat natural pesticides, which are the chemicals plants use to try to kill off insects trying to eat them, all the time. We eat roughly 1,500 milligrams of those per day, compared to the 0.09 milligrams we get from synthetic pesticide residues.
‘Marketing’ — and, let’s face it, outright lying — have sadly become normalized in organic.
Over 50 synthetic ingredients can be in organic food and it still be labeled ‘organic’.
In 2019, the USDA did tests. It found 26% of ‘organic’ samples had detectable levels of pesticides. And 9% had what the USDA considered unsafe levels.
Foreign growers can slap an ‘organic’ label on just about anything. It’s never checked.
The approved ‘natural’ pesticides, like it or not, are still toxins.
A few, such as copper sulfate or azadirachtin, are worse for both humans and the environment than targeted synthetic compounds. Which typically achieve better results.
Fertilize with manure? It puts far more nitrogen into the environment than synthetic fertilizer.
Big Organic correctly perceives conventional agriculture as its competition.
Which is why it’s not above playing dirty to kneecap it. The organic lobby is fighting a rear-guard, neo-Luddite battle against most new agricultural technology.
Hydroponic farms, which use no soil and no pesticides, can't be certified USDA Organic.
GMO labeling is currently the big battle.
Big Organic successfully made European consumers afraid of GMOs. For now.
In the US, it’s lost the fight.
Conventional produce is cheaper. The contest is likely to be decided by the economy.
A personal note. I’ve got some potatoes growing out back.
Potatoe plants are a bug magnet, specifically attracting Leptinotarsa decemlineata, the Colorado potato beetle.
An organic gardening web site recommended I pick them off by hand.
When I saw that, I thought: I’ve got better things to do.
Like move on to the next topic, the herbicide glyphosate.
Glyphosate was discovered by Monsanto chemist John E. Franz in 1970.
It was brought to market for agricultural use in 1974 under the now-infamous trade name Roundup.
Monsanto’s patent expired in 2000. Glyphosate is the proper word for the generic chemical.
Glyphosate was not a ‘selective’ herbicide like 2,4-D. It had the singular virtue of killing almost any plant. Although it does have a hard time with woody vines.
If you practice soil management by planting over-winter cover crops, you need to believe in glyphosate. You use it to kill down the cover crop in spring to make way for the money crop.
Monsanto famously genetically engineered around glyphosate’s propensity to kill every plant species by developing ‘Roundup resistant’ corn and soybeans.
Those seeds made Monsanto a lot of money.
And Monsanto wasn’t a company that was particularly nice to deal with. It had something farmers wanted, so it made them pay.
Which they would, because glyphosate offered a big productivity boost for them.
Weed control became greatly simplified: just spray the darn whole field with glyphosate.
Your resistant corn or soybeans will be the last plants left standing.
Glyphosate is the most used herbicide in US agriculture.
In the EU, it narrowly escaped a total ban last December.
Do we see the invisible hand of the Green NGOs at work?
Glyphosate is one of the most studied chemicals of all time.
It does not cause cancer.
Sir Colin Berry, Emeritus Professor of Pathology at Queen Mary University of London: “There are over 60 genotoxicity studies on glyphosate with none showing results that should cause alarm relating to any likely human exposure. For human epidemiological studies there are 7 cohort and 14 case control studies, none of which support carcinogenicity.”
The US EPA: glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans."
Even Sri Lanka — a country that has to be mentioned in any discussion of the future of European agriculture — rescinded its glyphosate ban in 2021 for ‘lack of scientific evidence’.
Yet California, Germany and Mexico are still talking about banning it.
So, how was this seed of doubt so carefully engineered? And by whom?
To take the second question first, credit to the Environmental Defense Fund, the American NGO that has been running anti-pesticides campaigns since the 1960s.
Its seed was lovingly nurtured in a small UN agency, IARC, the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
IARC holds that just about everything can cause cancer. Working night shifts, for example.
IARC did a ‘review of reviews’ — no original research. As is the way, the studies were carefully cherrypicked. None with any connection with Monsanto were allowed.
Glyphosate administered in extraordinary large doses to mice could bring on tumors.
As could any number of chemicals. As Paracelsus said, the dose makes the poison.
IARC’s key exhibit was a study of rural Colombians exposed to a Roundup during the US War on Drugs.
The author of that paper was sufficiently outraged to come out and say that the IARC had gotten his conclusion “totally wrong.”
Dr. Keith Solomon, a University of Guelph professor emeritus and a globally recognized authority on pesticides, is pretty clear: “There’s no evidence that glyphosate is genotoxic.”
But now, post-IARC, there’s uncertainty. The precautionary principle kicks in. Enough for California, perhaps.
It’s always instructive to follow the money.
We’ve already met the Organic Lobby. They were eager to deprive conventional agriculture of glyphosate.
More sinister were the American trial lawyers. From early days they had sized up Monsanto as liability piñata, just waiting to be cracked open and shower them with cash.
They were right about that, as it turned out. They — although probably not their clients — got a big payday.
Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, payed them off to make the claims go away: a cool $10 billion.
On the scale of weird, the Dutch stikstofcrisis is approaches the hallucinogenic.
Stikstof is nitrogen.
Nitrogen, the most abundant gas in the atmosphere, is natural.
The crisis part was pure human brainlessness.
The story starts with bird sanctuaries and nature preserves.
I have nothing against them. Neither do the Dutch. Or the EU.
Back in the day — 1992 — the EU decided to roll its bird sanctuary program into a more general ‘habitat’ program, the goal being to identify and help protect a representative selection of every type of European forest, grassland, or wetlands.
A noble goal. The Natura 2000 zones covered 18% of the EU, which is a lot, but they were not intended to be wilderness areas. Human use, included farming and forestry, was allowed.
Think of a Natura 2000 zone as a building designated a historic landmark. You can live in it, but you’re expected to take care of it.
There was grumbling about Brussels being heavy-handed and top-down establishing the Natura 2000 zones. The EU member states all had various nature conservation programs of their own.
Zoning issues are traditionally thrashed out at the local level. For planning and permitting, the EU’s nature zones added another bureaucratic hurdle.
In the US, Maryland blue crabs gave activist environmental lawyers entry into the legal system.
In the Netherlands, it was scraggy coastal weeds. Which may have been imaginary.
The Netherlands was brought to a screeching halt in July 2019 after a ruling by its administrative high court.
The legal case is bit of a brain-bender.
So the Netherlands, like all the EU countries, agreed to take care of the Natura 2000 areas.
What that means was the issue.
The Netherlands also issues permits that allows various businesses — for example, home builders — to emit nitrogen into the atmosphere.
Cars emit nitrogen, too. As does cow manure.
Now, nitrogen would appear to be a strange thing to permit.
But recall the fundamental tenet of ecologism: whatever humans do harms nature. Coming from humans is prima facie evidence it’s a bad thing.
Nitrogen deposition on the soil takes place when atmospheric nitrogen falls in rain.
Nitrogen is plant food. You buy Miracle-Gro at the garden center because it’s 36% nitrogen.
The crux of the case that, by permitting nitrogen emitters, the government was inadvertently applying a drizzle of fertilizer on the Natura 2000 zones.
How much? The RIVM, the Dutch environmental agency, has been trying to answer that question. It now has five different kinds of nitrogen monitoring devices all over the country.
So far, the RIVM has not had much luck. The natural nitrogen cycle is vast and noisy, and controlled not by humans, but microbes.
The amount of nitrogen deposited by rain is close to unmeasurable.
Being a fan of true crime, I decided to look into what nitrogen had actually done in a Natura 2000 area.
Not speculation about what it might do. An actual crime. Like mugging a jogger or something.
The best set of facts the RIVM concerned an area near a shoreline has a lousy, gravelly soil. Some weeds were growing there. The RIVM suspects they were enjoying the extra nitrogen.
This was one of those legal cases that may have been short on the facts, but was long on the law.
The judges threw out the permitting system.
And rescinded all issued permits.
Some 18,000 construction projects — bouwprojecten — came to a halt.
To get construction restarted quickly, the Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, lowered the speed limit on highways.
Rutte’s party, the VVD, is known as the vroemvroempartij (vroom vroom party).
In lieu of footnotes
David Zaruk’s very entertaining blog is called The Risk-Monger (link).
The Bruce Ames interview was by Reason magazine years ago. Ames is now 95 and still going. For something more recent about him, see "All the Carcinogens We Cannot See" by Siddhartha Mukherjee in the New Yorker, December 11, 2023.
For sanity on GMOs and chemical phobias, I highly recommend The Genetic Literacy Project
It's easy being a humorist when you've got the whole government working for you. — Will Rogers