The trouble with Dutch cows

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

The Netherlands - small and overcrowded - is facing fundamental questions about how to use its land, following a historic court judgment forcing the state to take more urgent action to limit nitrogen emissions. Dutch nitrogen emissions - damaging the climate and biodiversity - are the highest in Europe per capita. And though traffic and building are also partly to blame, farmers say the government is principally looking to agriculture to make the necessary reductions. They've staged a series of protests - what they call a farmers' uprising - in response to a suggestion from a leading politician that the number of farm animals in the country should be cut by half. This is meant to bring down levels of ammonia, a nitrogen compound produced by dung and urine. The proposal comes even though their cows, pigs and chickens have helped make the tiny Netherlands into the world's second biggest exporter of food. Farmers think they're being sacrificed so that the construction industry, also responsible for some nitrogen pollution, can have free rein to keep building, as the country's population, boosted by immigration, grows relentlessly. What do the Dutch want most - cows or houses? Will there be any room in the future for the ever-shrinking patches of nature? And in a hungry world, shouldn't the country concentrate on one of the things it's best at - feeding people? Tim Whewell travels through a country that must make big choices, quickly.

(image: Dutch dairy farmer Erik Luiten feeds a new calf. Credit: Tim Whewell/BBC)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Picture your reporter squatting under a wide, wide sky on the grassy verge of a Dutch country lane.
0:10.0	For assignment here on the BBC World Service, he's aiming his microphone at the
0:15.2	canal alongside, capturing the whisper of the breeze in the bulrushes.
0:20.1	The barge is chugging placidly by and in the rectangular ditch-framed field beyond equal placid,
0:28.6	equally rectangular big-boned black and white beasts are tearing up some of the greenest grass in the world.
0:37.0	What would the Netherlands be without cows?
0:41.0	Those four-legged, four-stomucked milk machines, providers of Gouda and Edam cheese.
0:47.0	They've helped make this tiny country the second biggest food exporter in the world.
0:57.0	Do you show me where the milk is going?
1:00.0	Oh gosh, so you're taking off a panel.
1:03.0	So I can, yeah, I can see the white bubbly milk here coming out into this tank here
1:10.0	through several different blue pipes.
1:12.0	It's also frothy. through several different blue pipes.
1:15.0	It's also frothy. What's the average yield from a single cow then?
1:17.0	A day?
1:18.0	A day about 30 liters, or 30 kilograms of milk a day, yes. Eric Loughton, short silvering hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and a blue boiler suit, tall, energetic, welcoming.
1:32.0	His family's farmed in the Eastern Netherlands for more than a hundred years,
1:36.4	and in his 30 years in the job the cows have become ever more generous.
1:41.6	We have last week the 10 cow who produced over 100,000 kilograms of milk in our lifetime.
1:49.0	That's quite an achievement.
1:51.0	Well, 10 years ago it was special, nowadays a little less special, but it's a sign that the cows are healthy and they're good taken care of.
1:59.2	They were human, they'd get a prize. You'd have a celebration.
	...

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