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Nitrogen Crisis - Coggle Diagram

- - - - When farmers decide to develop solar assets, they have two main options: lease land to solar developers or to produce solar power themselves. Between 2010 and 2019, the latter option was often deemed more profitable, because the UK feed-in tariff (FiT) saw the government pay generators of less than 5MW a guaranteed rate for supplying renewable power to the grid.
  - - - Populist-type of vision, places all responsibility at the level of consumers. They have to change, and only when (or if) they change effectively, will farmers then move farming forward (e.g. only after getting better prices they will invest in environmentally friendly measures).
- - - - Rabobank is the largest lender for farmers in the Netherlands. 85 percent of all farmers have a loan from the bank. Recently, the bank has received criticism from, among others, the House of Representatives about its role in expanding livestock farms.
      - Director Rens van Tilburg of the Sustainable Finance Lab, which conducts research into making the financial sector more sustainable, understands this criticism. "It is very striking that Rabobank says that they have complied with the law. That is a limited view of a bank's role. Banks look ahead, have information on a sector."
      - He points to warnings that were made decades ago about the expansion of livestock farming. “You expect a banker to use that knowledge to help clients make better investment decisions,” says Van Tilburg. "Obviously that didn't happen here."
      - This week, the bank received strong criticism from the World Wildlife Fund. WWF, which has been working with Rabobank for years, believes that the bank should take the lead and come up with concrete proposals to change agriculture. According to WWF, the bank is currently guilty of "false security in the short term".
        For example, the bank wants to encourage farmers with the companies Lely and FrieslandCampina to invest in robots and new floors in stables to reduce nitrogen emissions. This innovation is criticized by science and WWF because it is uncertain whether it really leads to less nitrogen emissions and will not solve other problems such as greenhouse gas emissions.
  - - - In all reflections and analyzes of the nitrogen crisis, one simple solution has consistently been ignored. A solution that makes the step to sustainable agriculture much easier and takes away a lot of unrest among farmers. Which is also fair, because then the real polluter pays: the solution is the cancellation of agricultural loans by Rabobank if farmers switch to sustainable agriculture. A major game changer with which Rabobank shows the way out of this crisis.
      - Canceling loans helps immediately. Dairy farmers, for example, have an average debt of 1.1 million euros, while the average dairy farm has a turnover of 417,000 euros and the cow farmer himself earns 46,000 euros per year. The financial scope for switching to sustainable agriculture is therefore limited, especially if you consider that the farmer pays interest to the bank, usually an amount equal to half of his income. Debt hangs like a millstone around his neck. If Rabobank were to cancel those debts, there would be scope for the switch to sustainable livestock farming, which would require fewer animals and therefore also less animal feed from distant countries and less expensive aids such as fertilizers and agricultural poisons.
      - If farmers allow themselves to be bought out by the government, they will immediately repay their loans from Rabobank. This will give the bank its money back. Rabobank will therefore benefit from the nitrogen billions. A bizarre combination of circumstances, because it was Rabobank that has driven upscaling and intensification in agriculture in recent decades. It made millions on that. In 2021, Rabo – one of the thirty major polluters asked by Milieudefensie for a climate plan – lent 35.7 billion euros to the Dutch agricultural and food sector.
  - - - This does not apply to all companies in the agricultural sector. Fewer cows means dairies have less milk to process. Fewer pigs and chickens in the barn means a loss of work and income for livestock transporters, slaughterhouses and meat processors. More organic farming leads to lower sales for fertilizer and pesticide sellers.
      - Companies like this have huge vested interests in the system as it runs today. And they're not about to give it up without a fight.
      - This is not about small boys, but about large companies with billions in turnover and branches at home and abroad: chemical giants such as Bayer and Syngenta that earn their money with seeds and crop protection products, dairy giants such as FrieslandCampina and large animal feed companies such as ForFarmers and De Heus, important suppliers. of (intensive) livestock farming in the Netherlands.
      - You will not see the CEOs of large agribusiness companies there. They do not show their power with tractors on the Malieveld, but mainly operate behind the scenes. By calling in lobby offices and playing publicity, by directing scientific research and by keeping short lines of communication with politicians.