Silence is golden...

Technology is  wonderful thing....when it works.  A power spike has taken me off the grid for a bit but am back with a vengance.  Watch out for more stuff from me.  I couldn't resist a photo of this place in a small Scottish village, they're soooo practical.

Common Agricultural Policy...

We heard from Herman Snijders from European Agricultural Policy group about the role, purpose and up-coming reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).  The challenge is to de-couple the payment system from agricultural production so it is being shifted accross to a 'Single Farm Payment' which is paid, with strings attached.  The policy is creating a  challenging  environment for young people to move into agriculture because it is targetted at land owners rather than those farming the land.

Manageing water run off and drainge is a major challenge for  Dutch Farmers.

It is also intended to try and support specific practices such as land set aside, hedgerow plantings, bio-diversity and so on, rather than being production focussed.  This is interesting given that within NZ there is increasing expectations from NZ society that the farmer should be doing this anyway, and carrying the cost within their businesses.  In Europe the arguement is that if society wants to have the farm land maintained, with certain aestetic values, then society needs to pay for it.  Not something I disagree with really, but not something that would be acceptabe in NZ.

Tour de Holland

A short tour of Holland showed the difference between a NZ and what I woud describe as an industrial landscape...people and traffic everywhere.  The dyke system is impressive and so is the renewable power, in the form of wind turbines.  A number of farmers have wind farms on the property...not a bad idea for home.

Wind farms are commonly owned by farmers who sell the power back to distributors

Flower Power

Talking about big business, we went to the Flora Holland flower (and pot plants) auction.....  To give you a sense of the scale of the business, which by the way is farmer owned, here are a couple of stats: total building footprint = 120ha, annual turnover over 4 Billion Euro (thats roughly $10 Billion NZ dollars, or nearly the size of the whole NZ red meat industry), 600 billion pot plants are sold every year, 12,000 billion flowers are sold there every year.

It is highly automated and in essence a logistics business.  Now I understand what a dutch auction is ...why don't we sell livestock that way?

Below are  couple of photos which show one of the auction rooms in action with three auction clocks running at the same time.   There is also a photo of the shop floor where dozens, if not hundreds of people zoom around on their carts and shift the stock to and from the sales rooms.

If only life were so simple...

 You can trust the Dutch to come up with such  simple, yet effective answers to life's big questions......

The good and bad of it....

It is interesting to see first hand the impact the CAP policies are having on Eurpoean Agriculture.  On one hand there is alot of traditional and conservative farming which is struggling to compete ecomnomically, while there is very impressive innovation and cutting edge technology used in agriculture.

The photos show Koppert Kress, near Rotterdam, which supplies the global trade with fresh salad ingredients.  They utilise LCD lighting and ground stores of energy to heat the water for the Glasshouses.  Over 1 hectare is under glass and the product is supplied all year round.  

It is a commonly held view that subsidies do not encourage innovation.  This is supported by the current success of the pig and horticultural industries, neither of whch are subsidised and are generally doing very well, thankyou.  Meanwhile the traditional farming systems such as dairying are struggling with profitability, and it could easily be argued that maintainence of the subsidy system is good for NZ agricuture.  That one I didn't see coming...

Gotta love the Irish

The scale of industry in Holland is hugely impressive.  A dinner cruise on the harbour in Rotterdam showed us the third largest super freighter in the world and the largest floating crane in the world. It is capable of lifting a combined weight of 14,000 tonnes in the two cranes.  According to the Irish Nuffield contingent, it might even be big enough to to pull New Zealand into the 21st Century.........