The Netherlands, A Country Of Livestock, Grapples With Eating Animals

John Arink is in an unusual position: he’s a livestock farmer who believes that people need to eat less meat.

“We have to reduce our animal protein consumption, of course,” says the ruddy, bespectacled John, 33 years to the day after he first milked a cow on this land in the Dutch province of Gelderland. He says this as if it should be obvious, as if it’s natural for a farmer with cows to want consumers to eat less beef.

But he believes that all members of society, farmers included, need to do their part toward a future where humans, animals, and the planet are healthier. “We all have to move in that transition,” he says.

For the last three decades, the farm, Ekoboederij Arink, has had about 50 dairy cows, plus 80 or so beef cattle. These feed mainly on grass from 85 hectares – the bulk of the farm’s land. The farm also has small populations of pigs (living in multiple outdoor pens) and chickens (whose grass enclosure is rotated every week or two around a clever mobile coop that provides light and security).

Keeping the herd sizes modest has advantages for health, John reports. “You can keep the cows without using antibiotics because you don’t have the big concentration of little cows.” Nor is there the combination of diseases that comes from mixing cows that have been trucked in from various parts of the country. “We only have our home diseases, which we can manage very well,” John says.

There’s also the animal welfare dimension: “You can’t treat animals well if you have 10,000 pigs in a barn and 100,000 chickens in a barn,” John emphasizes. “In the end all our animals are for human food. I agree with that, but before that I want to give the animals the best life they can have.”

These aren’t bleeding-heart decisions. John is savvy to the mix of opportunities presented by a gentler style of farming. For instance, all calves born on the farm stay here. He receives a premium under a ‘Calf love’ program that pays more for dairy produced on farms where calves are raised by mothers (or surrogate mothers).

The cows themselves come with a financial incentive. John receives a subsidy for stocking a heritage breed of cows, Frisian-Dutch. He says that this breed produces less milk than Holsteins, but in his experience the Frisian-Dutch have fewer health issues.

John is also an atypical livestock farmer in other ways. Though he comes from a family of farmers, and his son also works on the farm, he was able to start over on a new plot of land after local authorities transferred the family’s farmland to a new site. Taking up the reins of the farm, he was able to implement some fresh ideas.

His a-ha moment came during a tour of an organic farm in central Holland. “I was educated in the original way, with fertilizer and concentrate, but on that farm I saw the milk go into the tank without fertilizer,” he recounts. It made him realize what was possible without adding lots of synthetic inputs to the soil.

Most of the land he farms is rented, under a Dutch program that leases land below market rates, on the condition that the land is farmed sustainably, without intensification of animal stocks. This provides an escape hatch from the model of accruing more debt, and being required by creditors to raise more animals, that often comes with livestock farmers taking on more land in the Netherlands. “What’s the most efficient thing on this farm is that we rent a lot of land,” John says.

The bulk of the farm’s income now comes not from dairy, but from direct sales of food, mainly of meat, to customers. The one-room farm shop, which overlooks a barn of a couple dozen cows, is open two days a week. They also sell milk to a family-owned cheese producer, earning a 30% premium because of the biodynamic status of the milk production. Biodynamic (which has been criticized as having unscientific origins) is basically organic+: there are limits to how much manure can be produced and whether pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and antibiotics can be used. In practice, this limits how many animals can be raised.

Ekoboederij Arink presents a positive vision of what a compassionate, gentle-on-nature farm can be. Yet farming small is a choice that not all Dutch livestock farmers want to – or are able to – make.

People And Animals In A Small Country

The staggering numbers of livestock raised in the Netherlands are largely being consumed in other European countries. These 1.6 million cows, 12 million pigs, and 105 million chickens are crowded, alongside 18 million people, into a country half the size of South Carolina. So while the environmental harms of intensive livestock farming will mainly accrue within the Netherlands, the food it produces will feed relatively few Dutch residents.

Tijs Holtkuile, a 4^th-generation farmer with 2,700 pigs in Overijssel, acknowledges that the Netherlands is an overcrowded country when it comes to competing uses for land. He suggests that less land be given over to nature conservation areas. It’s been difficult for him to see young farm business shutting down around him.

It’s a sharp change to previous generations. For decades, farmers in the Netherlands have been pushed to increase their stocks of animals despite the consequences for animal welfare, climate, nature, and human health. While the Dutch government has belatedly recognized that this is an untenable situation, and the number of livestock in the country will need to be reduced to avoid drowning in manure, policies related to livestock numbers are largely disconnected from policies on domestic food consumption.

But that doesn’t mean that there’s no connection. Bram van Liere, a campaigner for the NGO Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands), argues that for food security, health, and environmental reasons, it’s important to transition toward producing and eating less meat domestically. To reduce suspicion that meat will be taken off people’s plates, a politically explosive topic, “We try to switch the topic to healthy food for everyone.”

Food companies are paying attention to (though sometimes resisting) the shifting winds. For instance, meat processor Vion recognizes the risk of overall meat demand decreasing in its home markets of the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. (Vion declined to comment for this article.)

Food Costs

One problem is that meat remains too cheap within the Netherlands. “We pay too little, and there are external costs that we don’t see in terms of landscape deterioration and animal welfare,” says Martha Bakker, a land-use expert at Wageningen University. And relying on the free market to correct for this doesn’t work. “The mechanism that consumers will voluntarily choose the more expensive, sustainably produced product in the market only works for a very small percentage of the consumers.”

This makes it challenging for farmers to plan around. “Consumers have to pay for it,” Holtkuile says of more sustainably produced food. His farm has taken steps toward higher animal welfare with Krull-style pig farming, which is still intensive but allows pigs a bit more space and material to root around.

Going further would be challenging, Holtkuile reports. “I can make my whole farm organic. It would cost me a lot of money…but I’m not sure if anyone is buying my products. That’s hard to make decisions on.” The farm started direct sales in part because the public has a more negative image of pork farming than dairy farming, and “we want to show people what we are doing, what it’s what it’s like behind those walls.” But direct sales make up just 1–2% of the farm’s sales.

There’s also a disparity in food access. While “there are many people who do want to pay more for their produce if it’s sustainable,” van Liere says, there’s also “the group of people who can’t afford the food they’re actually eating.” Driving down the prices of food that’s healthy for people and the planet would be helpful. In this respect, retailers have a great deal more power than individual consumers.

van Liere’s organization, Milieudefensie, has encouraged Ahold Delhaize – a food retail giant whose brands include the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, Albert Heijn – toward a sales goal of 70% plant-based protein by 2030, as the bulk of its greenhouse gas emissions come from meat and dairy. Other NGOs have set a 60% target for 2030 or a 50% target for 2025. The intermediate goal may be ambitious. According to the Green Protein Alliance, the ratio of plant-based protein to animal protein consumed in the Netherlands currently stands at 37:63.

According to ProVeg Netherlands, the seven largest supermarket chains in the country are aiming for 50% or 60% plant-based proteins sold by 2030. The retailer Jumbo says that its current ratio of plant-based protein to animal protein, like the broader industry’s, is 40/60.

A recent analysis that ProVeg Netherlands commissioned of common food products found that plant-based versions were cheaper than animal proteins overall (though not for certain dairy products). This is partly due to inflation and supply-chain issues. But one reason is a desire to meet sustainability targets.

“I think the main policy that is still hindering the 60% goal is that supermarkets are still heavily promoting animal-based products,” says Pablo Moleman, the director of the NGO ProVeg Netherlands. “Low prices on meat, including promotions and special offers, are used by retailers as a means of pulling in customers. Of the special offers retailers make on protein-rich products, over 80% is on animal-based products.”

However, in March 2024, Jumbo announced a first among Dutch supermarkets: an end to sales promotions on fresh beef, pork and chicken. Moleman comments, “I think they made a wise move not to antagonize their customers by communicating they are aiming for ‘always low prices’ instead of temporary offers.”

Pricing strategies clearly affect consumers’ decisions over what kinds of proteins to reach for on supermarket shelves. A Jumbo spokesperson reports that pricing plant-based proteins at the same cost, or lower than, animal proteins at the end of 2023 “led to 15% higher sales of plant-based products during that period.”

Farmer John Arink believes less in direct income support to farmers, and more in support to consumers to make more sustainable choices, to stimulate demand (rather than encourage oversupply). His family’s farm can be run sustainability, he believes, because of the minority of people who are willing and able to spend a bit more for thoughtfully produced food. But in the experience of Holtkuile, who has to combine pig farming with external office work, local consumption isn’t enough to make the math work.

Fraught Decisions Around Food

Amidst the political and social strife around livestock farming in the Netherlands, it may be easier for retailers to lower prices for food with fewer emissions, rather than taking action that may appear to directly disadvantage livestock farmers. “Clearly, ‘eat more plants’ is an easier sell for them than ‘eat less meat and dairy,’ says Moleman.

That kind of cut-price promotion on animal products also doesn’t help livestock farmers. “Farmers organisations themselves have for years complained that supermarkets do not pay a fair price for their products,” Moleman explains. The Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), a political party formed in 2019 in response to farmer protests, has called for a ban on such “stunt pricing.” In a rare spot of overlap, “it seems this is the sort of policy that both the farmers and the environmentalists can get behind,” Moleman believes.

Yet polarization remains highly visible, especially on social media. In March there was a fierce backlash to the Week Without Meat & Dairy, an annual campaign that encourages people in the Netherlands to reduce their consumption of animal products. The campaign has been running since 2018, and has attracted negative comments from the start. But the organizers noticed an intensification of ill will this year.

“This past edition was different,” reports Isabel Boerdam, the founder of the National Week Without Meat Foundation. “Farmers protested with tractors at major supermarket chains that joined the campaign, and in the village of Hazerswoude, the end of the Week was celebrated with a ‘we can eat meat and dairy again’ action. Online, there was also extra hate visible.”

Boerdam says that the campaign is actually promoting a flexitarian diet, yet that message is getting obscured. “We observe that supporters and opponents are only further entrenching themselves and no longer listening to each other. As a result, we are not making progress together.”

van Liere also believes that polarization among farmers is relatively recent. He says that before the nitrogen crisis, the majority of farmers reported wanting to farm more sustainably. This has changed with political splintering, but can be reversed.

On Ekoboederij Arink, John Arink’s youngest son, Tim, pushes his own one-month old son around in a stroller in between distributing food to the animals and reflecting on the social divisions he’s seen in his own life. “All my friends are farmers,” Tim says. Yet these are all fellow organic and biodynamic farmers. Tim says that the local conventional farmers he once was friendly with believe that the Arink style of less intensive farming is ineffective, and have not been open to discussion about it. They don’t see each other anymore.

A muddy pig pen on Ekoboederij Arink, where a sow is being suckled by a dozen squealing piglets, is overshadowed by the very long barn on the neighboring farm that houses over 1,000 pigs. The Arinks were opposed to the barn’s construction, and according to Tim, the neighbors “took it really personally.” Now the neighbors are retaliating by opposing plans for the house he wants to build on the Arinks’ land, so that he, his wife, and children can live in their own home.

Neighboring pig farmers who don’t speak to each other represent just one rung of the rifts over food consumption and production that are affecting the Netherlands. Diversifying protein sources is a golden opportunity to address food security, nature, and health, all at the same time. Yet not everyone is poised to benefit equally. And these decisions feel very personal to many.

This is part 2 of a series on Dutch livestock farming. The other article is “Layers Of Responsibility For Dutch Nitrogen Pollution.”

This article was reported with the support of a Clean Energy Wire (CLEW) research tour.