 | | Joel Salatin
Contributor | Having done many farmer seminars in Europe, I'd like to share my perspective on the farmer uprisings there. Many issues are converging to cause this unrest... and both sides are to blame. Anyone who reacts with a one-sided "poor farmers" sigh does not appreciate mainline agriculture in Europe. First, let's look at why this started in the Netherlands. [Investing Wizard Who Turned $37K Into $2.7m (In Just 4 Years!) Makes His Next Big Move... Join Him ] The answer is simple... That's where farming's ecological abuses are most apparent and critical. Not only is the Netherlands at or below sea level, it is essentially a massive delta and wetland through which more than half of Europe's rivers drain. When these fields were first drained for cropland, they contained massive amounts of legacy biomass. This provided a sponge for water and a base to hold up the ground. Tilling the land injected oxygen into the soil, which began oxidizing this spongey base. That caused sinkage. As these fields sunk, they became waterlogged. In the Netherlands, a foot of height difference in a field is the difference between being usable and not being usable. Thousands of acres are going through this problem. Reckless Spending Meanwhile, the European Union gives $60 billion a year in direct subsidy payments to farmers. Netherland farmers, for example, receive $1,000 an acre per year just for owning farmland. This skews not only the value of farmland, but the economics of farming. Small farms, with these kinds of subsidies, can overbuy big equipment and overbuild infrastructure. As a result, farmers don't have to watch their pennies. They can spend with reckless abandon, like building expensive barns for livestock. Leveraging heritage relationships from when the Dutch ruled the seas, these farmers enjoy bottom-rate feed grain contracts with Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Massive grain imports coupled with overbuilt livestock housing means the farmers are not tied to ecological carrying capacity. I've met dairy farms with 100 cows on 10 acres. That's about 220,000 pounds of manure and urine per acre. An acre can only handle about 50,000 pounds per year. Where does the excess go? Into the canals, creating four times the nitrogen load compared to any other European country. Rural areas smell like a toilet. The nutrient-clogged canals grow copious amounts of biomass like willows and other hydrologic plants, trying to use up the excess nutrients. That growth leads to high municipal clean-out and dredging costs. When you add up the farmers' impact... you have odors, sinking landscapes and costly canal maintenance. I think you get the picture. When I've done seminars about how to farm differently in these areas, the many farmers who attend all know European farming is not taking care of the environment. Neither is American farming, but the average consumer in our country is more oblivious. European consumers are far more aware of what's going on. Europe has a food culture, and it's not McDonald's. Big difference. Now let's look at the other side... Dealmaker's Diary: Bank on This Cheap Fintech That's Growing Quickly  After last year's one-two-three punch of banking blowups... the sector is undervalued by many measures. Add to that the rise of AI... and you get a cheap fintech stock that is quickly growing. Check it out here. Can you guess these five letters?  For 27 years, they've been the key to beating the market by more than 550%! Get the answer here. This Crypto Bull Market Is for Real  Robert Ross and Shah Gilani sit down to chat about Bitcoin, small caps, investing in an election year and more. Watch it here (with transcript).
Want more content like this? | | | | | Joel Salatin Joel Salatin calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. Those who don't like him call him a bioterrorist, Typhoid Mary, a charlatan and a starvation advocate. He draws on a lifetime of food, farming and fantasy to entertain and inspire audiences around the world. | | | | 
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