"Seen from the air, the Netherlands resembles no other major food producer—a fragmented patchwork of intensely cultivated fields, most of them tiny by agribusiness standards, punctuated by bustling cities and suburbs. In the country’s principal farming regions, there’s almost no potato patch, no greenhouse, no hog barn that’s out of sight of skyscrapers, manufacturing plants, or urban sprawl. More than half the nation’s land area is used for agriculture and horticulture.
Banks of what appear to be gargantuan mirrors stretch across the
countryside, glinting when the sun shines and glowing with eerie
interior light when night falls. They are Holland’s extraordinary
greenhouse complexes, some of them covering 175 acres.
These climate-controlled farms enable a country located a scant
thousand miles from the Arctic Circle to be a global leader in exports
of a fair-weather fruit: the tomato. The Dutch are also the world’s top
exporter of potatoes and onions and the second largest exporter of
vegetables overall in terms of value. More than a third of all global
trade in vegetable seeds originates in the Netherlands."
Great article.
Great article.
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