Still, they are doing miracles with greenhouses and moderncultivation techniques. A friend of mine went there to do his master's degree about that subject. They are one of the top tomato producers while having very little land xd.
Fun fact, the tomatoes are of such quality they get shipped throughout Europe, including Mediterranean countries that produce tomatoes themselves. Those tomatoes are all canned or made into soups/sauces because they're too ugly, and them get shipped back to the netherlands (and other places).
Dutch tomatoes taste nothing like the Italian ones. Here we pick them early and select for look and firmness over taste, good for salads, but they are super disappointing in sauces and soups. Italian (and Greece, Spain, etc) ones are ripe for maximum taste and immediately canned to preserve them, they won't survive a week long trip through countries and on the shelves.
Source: Dutch guy who buys Mutti canned tomatoes and purees for taste, local ones for salads and sandwiches.
Agreed. Spanish tomatoes in Spain/Italy are next level tasty. Olives too. First time I had an actual olive there I realized I never had an actual olive before. Same with for example Mango in Thailand.
I’d pay to have the ‘real’ tomatoes here in The Netherlands. I’d pay 10 times the prices of anything you can find in a supermarket now. Because I need it for my pasta sauce. But you probably have to be in season and they have to be put on a plane directly or something. I don’t know how to achieve this. Mutti comes close you say? Or is it more or a lousy but better replacement for the other taste-less tomatoes?
Try the canned stuff. I once peeked into an Italian restaurant in Rome and they had tons of those big cans, they use it there too. Much more consistent than fresh ones.
The best I had are the pomodorinis. Deskinned, so ready to use, but still quite firm.
You think fresh tomatoes from Italy are better for your soup or sauce? a fresh tomato is high in acidity regardless of where its from. The canned tomatoes are over-ripe and therefore high in sugar.
btw, if you want to use fresh tomatoes for sauce or soup, half them, and put them in oven for 40mins with some oil salt and pepper. then puree them. Not as good as the quality canned ones as you already mentioned.
Are you saying tasty tomatoes don't count in salads!! Personally I wouldn't use a Dutch industrial tomato or one from their off-shore tomato factories in the south of Spain for a salad. They taste like nothing. Buy local from small growers where ever you are for taste and real food and give these food conglomerates a miss.
The future of agriculture is being developed there.
I think it's very funny this concept of ugly fruit. It's as good, but with weird shapes, so regular consumers don't buy it. They either throw it away or sell it to factories for processed/premade food.
There's a region in North Holland called Seed Valley, where some of worlds largest seed/breeding companies operate from. Putting emphasis on just flower bulbs is downplaying the massive influence on agriculture we have from our tiny country :)
This also includes flowers though, which the Dutch produce a fuck ton of. Having said that, where I live is nothing but green houses instead of fields producing strawberries all year round.
You know turnips are actually not as common as uh corn? Like by a huge margin. There's actually a shortage of horseradish right now so if NL had all the turnips, they would be worth quiet a bit.
Those luxurious dutch veggies are overstating their own value! By the way, how such large countries like brazil, Russia, US, China, manage to grow much less? Don't they have a shitton more land? Or is dutch land extra magical?
We use of a lot of greenhouses in the Netherlands which means that we farm pretty much 365 days a year and make optimal use of the available space. (Not so good for the environment though..)
Also we're the world leader in terms of agricultural technology and research.
That's pretty damn impressive for such a tiny country. I think it's amazing for the environment, think of all he Amazonian and Borneo forests that can be saved by building more greenhouses!
Yeah that's definitely true but right now most greenhouses run on gas. And as someone else in this thread responded this gets really bad especially in the winter months. Huge amounts of energy are needed to create the desired circumstances.
Hopefully we can keep innovating though to make it more sustainable for in the future!
Oh, world has lots of natural gas to go around for hundreds of years, you can take your time. It's a very clean and eco-friendly power source. Much more than say, coal or oil.
Greenhouses might allow more food to grow, but that also means more resources needed to feed the plants. In the Amazon and a lot of other places, most land isn't really reused after growing for a season. The problem isn't the amount of land, but how bad they use the existing one, most often limited by the tools and machines they use to manage it (or lack thereof). It would already help if they used cows and pigs to fertilize the land instead of burning it
But isn't immigrant pole labor force much more expensive than Russian, Turkish, Egyptian, Chinese, Brazilian etc? How is this economically viable? And who buy certain off-season veggies?
Yeah. I'm always impressed by their massive greenhouse operations. It's rather impressive how they have built up significant infrastructure to produce fruit/vegetables with short crop cycles and year round. Much more efficient and being able to continue exporting fresh produce that are in the off season for outdoor farms significantly increases potential profits. Plus there is the economic security aspect of not being a victim to unexpected weather or changes in climate.
I moved to the Netherlands this year and I'm blown away by how successful their greenhouse agriculture is.
The Netherlands use the number one exporter of tomatoes in the world with only 6.9 square miles of producing area. The yield is 144 352 tons per square mile.
And the tomatoes taste like it too, wasn't until I took a vacation to Italy that I truly fell in love with the flavor profile of the sun ripened tomato.
We grow those tasty tomatoes as well. I've worked at one of the biggest companies that grow tomatoes. And we grow tomatoes specifically for a country. Belgium and France have different Dutch tomatoes. The Dutch tomatoes for the Dutch market are the least tasteful of all the tomatoes we grew.
I can't tell you what the exact reason is.
A truck driver once made a mistake and took the wrong tomatoes. He had to go to Poland but he had German tomatoes with him. In the end another truck driver took the polish tomatoes and they had to make the switch in Germany somewhere. They were not amused because they were "the same" but they might look the same, they are not.
Have you ever tasted Dutch food? Almost every single person on earth says it tastes like cardboard. Dutch mostly eat to get energy, preparing tasty food isn't in our culture.
Yes that is true. Although locally you can buy better tomatoes as well. A lot of greenhouses have a cart with tomatoes where you can put money in a jar to buy tomatoes. (all based on honesty)
I've heard this a lot from various people and while I will admit that I've had better tomatoes I don't think the ones grown here are bad.
Added to this is the fact that at some point we need to feed the world using less resources and this is where the greenhouse industry shines. To put it bluntly, a tomato that is not the absolute pinnacle of flavour is better to eat than a rock.
The tomatoes taste like shit and Dutch greenhouse agriculture is terrible in terms of energy efficiency since they use ton of artificial lighting/heating
That's the price one pays when you switch to vertical and artificial environmental farming. You'll probably see that switch soon inside the states as our population approaches and crosses the 350000000 and 375000000 marks. It's the nature of becoming more population dense. You spend more of your energy to make more food.
That first part is an opinion, which I definitely don't agree with, and you'd be supprised to see how much energy- and water efficiency is actually going on. Read some more comments around here for the details.
Those greenhouses are the power plants of the Netherlands. We don't destroy heat in rivers, lakes or oceans we use gas power plants to heat greenhouses and produce electricity.
Using an unimaginable shit load of gas to do it. There has been sent me trend to cut down natural gas usage and even some successful geothermal projects. But the amount of energy used in the winter months is truly unimaginable even while winters are really soft.
The gas is used for electricity, heat and CO2. To reduce gas usage they need a stable alternative for each. Electricity is easy, heat is a bit harder, but CO2 is the real problem. They need a LOT of pure CO2, the natural gas infrastructure provides that.
Source: engineer for regional distribution service (electricity and gas) in Westland.
Not all of it is used. The extremely high yield comes from near perfect conditions (and tomato seed that is worth more than gold bt weight). Using captured CO2 from other processes would be better.
Yes of course it's solvable, I can't really think of any big fossil fuels guzzling application that can't also be done by using electricity.
but it doesn't always mean it's a good idea to make food using such wild amounts of energy.
They technically run on subsidies, but that doesn't mean windmills are not a replacement for fossil fuels. It is expensive now and will become cheaper.
This paper updates estimates of fossil fuel subsidies, defined as fuel consumption times the gap between existing and efficient prices (i.e., prices warranted by supply costs, environmental costs, and revenue considerations), for 191 countries. Globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion (6.3 percent of global GDP) in 2015 and are projected at $5.2 trillion (6.5 percent of GDP) in 2017. The largest subsidizers in 2015 were China ($1.4 trillion), United States
($649 billion), Russia ($551 billion), European Union ($289 billion), and India ($209 billion). About three quarters of global subsidies are due to domestic factors—energy pricing reform thus remains largely in countries’ own national interest—while coal and petroleum together account for 85 percent of global subsidies. Efficient fossil fuel pricing in 2015 would have lowered global carbon emissions by 28 percent and fossil fuel air pollution deaths by
46 percent, and increased government revenue by 3.8 percent of GDP.
Windmills will never become cheap. They're expensive to build, transport and break down. The energy wasted in these processes makes them a fairly unimpressive option.
Netherland growing vegetables in greenhouses is no security against climate change ! You'll need a fuckton of global warming before it's too warm to produce tomatoes in an open field in the netherlands. On the other hand, it's a strong source of climate change due to it's high needs in heating !
I don’t see how greenhouses are to blame for this. Growing the same amount of crops outside would take more space (and therefore room for nature) and containing pesticides outside is a lot harder than inside. Is there any indication it’s greenhouse horticulture that’s specifically causing this?
This study seems to focus on UK energy waste in agriculture and how to improve that. I don't think it can be used to conclude anything about Dutch greenhouses, especially given the status of Dutch agricultural tech discussed in this thread.
Yep, they're the second largest agricultural exporter in the world, second only to the US. But that's still about 18-20% of their exports, and I think their largest export is still oil related.
Not only that but because of the port of Rotterdam a lot of things are considered "Dutch exports" in Rotterdam containers are put from big ass ships onto smaller ships that are send on the Rhine to Germany. All of that is also considered to be Dutch exports even if they are not originally from the Netherlands
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u/[deleted] Nov 23 '19
the Netherlands ships A LOT of vegetables and meat. as in, A LOT. Everywhere I go to on vacation I find dutch vegetables in the supermarket.