“There’s a new tomato virus and we recently found the resistance to that virus in our seed bank,” Mazereeuw said. The country’s greenhouses produce nearly a million tons of tomatoes a year, with exports totaling around $2 billion annually. More than 12 billion heads of lettuce are grown each year from Enza Zaden’s seeds, but it was a tomato in the early 1960s that really put the company on the map - and perhaps what, in turn, put the Netherlands on the map for tomatoes. RIGHT: Lettuce is bagged for sale inside a Siberia Greenhouse facility in Maasbree. LEFT: The inside of a greenhouse where lettuce on water is being produced in Maasbree. We need to find solutions for subsistence farmers all the way up to large-scale farmers.” We’re looking at resilient varieties, seeds for organic farms as well as varieties that are more salt tolerant for places where water quality is not good. “With climate change, we are seeing the weather becoming more extreme. “We are very much a research company,” he said. Jaap Mazereeuw, Enza Zaden’s managing director, said the company spends $100 million annually on research, introducing about 150 new vegetable varieties each year. In three generations, Enza Zaden has evolved from a family-owned seed shop into a global market leader in vegetable breeding, with more than 2,500 employees and 45 subsidiaries in 25 countries. Enza Zaden is headquartered here, just north of Amsterdam. There is an area in the northwest called Seed Valley, where new varieties of vegetables and flowers are in constant development. Farmers and ranchers have protested, and it remains to be seen how this standoff will be resolved.Ī worker at Syngenta pollinates a plant by hand in Enkhuizen.ĭutch companies are the world’s top suppliers of seeds for ornamental plants and vegetables. This summer, a conservative government coalition pledged to halve nitrogen emissions by 2030, which would necessitate a dramatic reduction in the number of animals raised in the country. And the country’s intensive animal agricultural practices are also at risk. But there are challenges: The greenhouse industry has flourished in part because of cheap energy, but Western Europe is facing soaring gas prices. With their limited land and a rainy climate, the Dutch have become masters of efficiency. Their centrality in global food exploration is indisputable: Fifteen out of the top 20 largest agrifood businesses - Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Cargill and Kraft Heinz - have major research and development centers in the Netherlands. But it could be argued that the preoccupation with food began in the 17th century, when the Dutch were at the center of the global spice trade. The Dutch often say their singular focus on food production is born of the harrowing famine the country experienced during World War II. More than half of the land in the Netherlands is used for agriculture. Dutch farms use only a half-gallon of water to grow about a pound of tomatoes, while the global average is more than 28 gallons. These greenhouses, with less fertilizer and water, can grow in a single acre what would take 10 acres of traditional dirt farming to achieve. The country has nearly 24,000 acres - almost twice the size of Manhattan - of crops growing in greenhouses. But it also provides vegetables to much of Western Europe. The Netherlands produces 4 million cows, 13 million pigs and 104 million chickens annually and is Europe’s biggest meat exporter.
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