# data[].attributes.headline
Sustainable and yet highly productive agriculture

# data[].attributes.subject
Sustainable and yet highly productive agriculture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Uniform fields with monocultures of ryegrass, maize, potatoes or wheat are a familiar sight in the Netherlands. But motorists driving down the A6 motorway near Almere are offered a different view: a mosaic of different crops growing side by side in the same field. These strip cropping fields are managed by ERF BV (Exploitant Reservegronden Flevoland).

ERF BV is the largest organic vegetable grower in the Netherlands. The company manages 1,000 hectares of arable farmland in Flevoland and has been experimenting with strip cropping on part of this land since 2015. ERF grows potatoes, field beans and various other vegetables such as celeriac, parsnips, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower in these fields. Dirk van Apeldoorn is a researcher with WUR's chair group Farming Systems Ecology and business unit Field Crops and has been conducting measurements and offering the company advice for improvements.

Advantage of strip cropping

ERF initially started growing various potato varieties and other vegetables side by side in 6-metre strips. The company then went on to test strips of varying widths (6, 12 and 24 metres). These are logical widths, says Van Apeldoorn, because the farm implements used for fertilisation, crop management and harvesting are typically multiples of 6 metres wide. He found that the yields of the cropping strips were similar to those of the monocultures, as was the labour efficiency of the organic farming system. However, an important advantage was that the crops in the 6-metre strips were less affected by pests and diseases.

Farm of the Future in Lelystad

Since 2010, WUR has also been experimenting with strip cropping at their agroecology and technology research lab in Lelystad. This research lab is a breeding ground for new techniques that are subsequently implemented at the Farm of the Future, also in Lelystad. To his surprise, Van Apeldoorn found that potatoes grown in 3-metre strips at the Farm of the Future produced a 25% higher yield per hectare than a whole field of potato crop grown on clayey soil near Lelystad. On the sandy soil in Wageningen, strip cropping yielded 12% more potatoes per hectare. "We think beneficial soil fungi play a role in this higher production, but this will require further research," says Van Apeldoorn. At ERF, where potatoes are cultivated in 6-metre strips, the researchers did not find the same increase in yield.

Strip cropping requires skilled farmers

"Strip cropping is still in its infancy," says Van Apeldoorn. "But do not expect us to complete our trials and then tell cropping farmers what they need to do on their farms. The right crops and combinations of crops very much depend on local conditions. Strip cropping requires a lot of skill of the farmers. They must learn to monitor ecological conditions, accept complexity and manage variation."

The right crops and combinations of crops very much depend on local conditions.

Dirk van Apeldoorn

This is why it is mainly organic farmers that have invested in strip cropping to date. "In conventional agriculture, you are guaranteed a good yield if you use the right varieties and apply fertiliser and crop protection measures at just the right moment; you control the growth of the crop from start to finish," says Van Apeldoorn. "In organic cultivation, you do not have all these means of control and have to rely more on your own observations of what is happening in the field, and take that into account next season. What works for one farmer, might work differently for another, and this makes strip cropping more of a challenge for conventional arable farmers."

More field birds with strip cropping

However, there are a number of conventional farmers participating in WUR's practical network of 50 farmers who are adopting strip cropping. These include an arable farmer in the Veenkoloniën (a former peatland region in the province of Groningen) who grows potatoes, cereal crops and sugar beets. He used to grow potatoes in crop rotations on a whole field, now he is planting them in 27-metre-wide strips. "This farmer is not participating to decrease his use of crop protection agents; he had already stopped using insecticides," says Van Apeldoorn. "He is adopting strip cropping to attract more field birds to his land." The combination of potatoes and cereals in a single field draws field birds because they like to nest among the dense cereal crops and forage in the adjacent open strips where the potatoes grow. Previously, a black desert remained after the potatoes and wheat were harvested, but with the strip method the birds can always find food and shelter. Bird counts have already proven that this farmer's approach is working.

Yellow wagtail on ERF field beans

But the experiments have not always been successful. The literature suggested that maize would be suitable for strip cropping, alternated with cereal crops or legumes, but when organic arable farmers started including maize in their strip cropping systems, the crows ate all the seeds. You can grow maize in strips, Van Apeldoorn explains, but then you will need to plant with conventional, coated maize seeds that the crows will not eat. Another discovery was that you should not plant spinach next to potatoes if the spinach is going to be used in baby food, because you do not want residues of toxic potato leaves ending up in it.

Strip cropping versus mixed cropping

Strip cropping is a small step in the transition to sustainable agriculture, says Van Apeldoorn. It is not the perfect solution, but it is a feasible system for many farmers. A bigger step is mixed cropping. In mixed cropping, you grow two crops that have a beneficial effect on each other either mixed together or separately in rows of 1 to 1.5 metres wide. Wopke van der Werf and Tjeerd Jan Stomph of WUR are studying this form of agriculture.

They recently published an article in which they review the results of 226 field experiments with mixed cropping around the world. Their research produced some remarkable conclusions. Successful mixed cropping can achieve 28% higher yields than you would expect from the sum of the two crops separately. Apparently, they strengthen each other's production. The researchers conclude that mixed cropping requires 19% less land on average than monocultures to produce the same yield.

These results are based on successful combinations of maize mixed with legumes, such as soy, lentils or field beans. Legumes also combine well with wheat, as they bind nitrogen and are an effective green manure crop. The combination of maize and wheat is also interesting, especially winter wheat, as you can harvest the wheat in July and the maize in October. Combining early and late developing crops enables you to take advantage of the full growing season and make more efficient use of the available light, water and nutrients, experiments show.

Advantages and disadvantages of mixed cropping

Mixed cropping has clear advantages, says Van der Werf. The crops provide similar yields, but with a lower environmental impact (fewer fertilisers and plant protection agents) and more biodiversity. The climate risks - crop failures due to heat and drought, for example - are also often lower in mixed cropping, because the risks are spread more.

Still, mixed cropping only plays a very modest role in the global food supply, and is mainly applied in developing countries. French farmers sporadically grow pea-wheat mixtures, and mixed crops of maize with cereals or vegetables are still grown on small fields in parts of China, but these farming systems are on the wane due to the modernisation and mechanisation of agriculture. The main problem with mixed cropping is that all farm machinery is designed for monocultures. In fact, the entire cropping system - from varieties and fertilisers to crop protection practices - is aimed at optimising individual crops, and not combinations of these crops.

Precision agriculture

So, now it is time for the farm machinery manufacturers to do their part to make mixed cropping possible. They need to design smaller machines that can recognise and manage different crops in the same field differently. This is the domain of precision agriculture, where farmers use cameras, sensors and satellite data to care for their plants and remove unwanted weeds. In the case of mixed cropping, this will require robots that can recognise different crops and beneficial herbs and flowers (good for suppressing pests), as well as unwanted weeds, and are programmed to manage each crop individually.

With respect to this technological development, we need to distinguish between strip cropping and mixed cropping, says Peter Groot Koerkamp, professor of Agricultural and Bio resource Engineering. "Strip cropping still involves a linear pattern of sowing, weeding, spraying and harvesting," he says. "You still harvest the whole crop, only you no longer do so over a width of 48 or 27 metres, but over 3 metres or less. In practice, that means reducing the working width of farm machinery, and that means reversing the current trend."

Meanwhile, fully autonomous weeding robots are already being developed for fields of 3 metres wide that can spray herbicides very precisely using sensors, and the first potato harvester for 3-metre strips is currently being tested. "There is no 3-metre-wide beet harvester yet, but that is only a matter of time. The main drawback for the arable farmer is that these new machines are still more expensive than conventional equipment."

The biggest challenge, according to Groot Koerkamp, is the harvesters. You need lanes between the strips, just like with monocultures today, but machines with a 27-metre reach require fewer lanes than 3-metre machines. Continuously driving heavy machinery over these lanes leads to soil compaction, which is bad for soil quality and consequently for yields. Smaller and lighter harvesters could be a solution, but even then the potatoes still have to be removed from the field by heavy tractors. "We need to stop using the heavy machines that harvest and transport the potatoes at the same time, but we don't yet have an alternative system for getting the potatoes off the field without compacting the soil."

New farm logistics concepts

Groot Koerkamp envisions new farm logistics concepts, for example involving a rolling conveyor system that carries all the potatoes to the end of the field. However, that idea is currently still in the phase of a group of students sketching a rough design.

With mixed cropping, the engineers will have to jettison the linear model. "Mixed cropping involves multiple varieties of crops, herbs and weeds. We need to be able to recognise the various different plants and determine which ones get to stay and which ones have to go, and at the same time manage how the various plants compete with each other."

The fields will become smaller, with cultivation techniques that are both intensive and ecologically sound.

Peter Groot Koerkamp

The required technology is currently being developed. For example, startup Saia Robotics, the brainchild of WUR PhD candidate Ruud Barth, has developed a broccoli harvesting machine that can autonomously determine which broccoli plants are ripe and can be harvested. "This technology could also be used to plant mixed crops and harvest them separately, all using the same machine," says Groot Koerkamp.

In the past, the trend in agrotechnology has been towards ever larger and heavier machines that combine various operations such as mowing, threshing and transport, for example. The new trend will involve smaller and lighter machines, whereby these operations are separated again, says Groot Koerkamp. Dirk van Apeldoorn also sees another trend in agriculture: "The fields will become smaller, with cultivation techniques that are both intensive and ecologically sound."

Sustainable futures

WUR works on sustainable futures. This entails climate-neutral food systems and landscapes that benefit biodiversity. The first episode on sustainable futures covered the future of the North Sea. This story about future sustainable agriculture is episode 2.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sustainable and yet highly productive agriculture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Netherlands is committed to developing a sustainable and highly productive food system, with less use of fertilisers, water and pesticides, and more biodiversity and crop diversity. To help achieve this goal, WUR is conducting research into ecological arable farming systems based on strip cropping and mixed cropping.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Show authors

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 18, 1325-1343 (2013) Cite this article

4592 Accesses

57 Citations

108 Altmetric

Metrics

Abstract

Purpose

This study of seven foods assessed whether there are modes or locations of production that require significantly fewer inputs, and hence cause less pollution, than others. For example, would increasing imports of field-grown tomatoes from the Mediterranean reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by reducing the need for production in heated greenhouses in the UK, taking account of the additional transport emissions? Is meat production in the UK less polluting than the import of red meat from the southern hemisphere?

Methods

We carried out a life-cycle inventory for each commodity, which quantified flows relating to life-cycle assessment (LCA) impact categories: primary energy use, acidification, eutrophication, abiotic resource use, pesticide use, land occupation and ozone depletion. The system boundary included all production inputs up to arrival at the retail distribution centre (RDC). The allocation of production burdens for meat products was on the basis of economic value. We evaluated indicator foods from which it is possible to draw parallels for foods whose production follows a similar chain: tomatoes (greenhouse crops), strawberries (field-grown soft fruit), apples (stored for year-round supply or imported during spring and summer), potatoes (early season imports or long-stored UK produce), poultry and beef (imported from countries such as Brazil) and lamb (imported to balance domestic spring-autumn supply).

Results and discussion

Total pre-farm gate global warming potential (GWP) of potatoes and beef were less for UK production than for production in the alternative country. Up to delivery to the RDC, total GWP were less for UK potatoes, beef and apples than for production elsewhere. Production of tomatoes and strawberries in Spain, poultry in Brazil and lamb in New Zealand produced less GWP than in the UK despite emissions that took place during transport. For foods produced with only small burdens of GWP, such as apples and strawberries, the burden from transport may be a large proportion of the total. For foods with inherently large GWP per tonne, such as meat products, burdens arising from transport may only be a small proportion of the total.

Conclusions

When considering the GWP of food production, imports from countries where productivity is greater and/or where refrigerated storage requirement is less will lead to less total GWP than axiomatic preference for local produce. However, prioritising GWP may lead to increases in other environmental burdens, in particular leading to both greater demands on and decreasing quality of water resources.

Access options

Buy single article

Instant access to the full article PDF.

USD 39.95

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

References

AEA, Cranfield University, Moorhouse E, Paul Watkiss Associates, AHDBMS, Marintek (2008) Comparative life cycle assessment of food commodities procured for UK consumption through a diversity of supply chains. Final report for Defra project FO0103, 18 pp and Appendices. http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Menu=Menu&Module=More&Location=None&ProjectID=15001&FromSearch=Y&Publisher=1&SearchText=FO0103&SortString=ProjectCode&SortOrder=Asc&Paging=10#Description

Barber A, Lucock D (2006) Total energy indicators: benchmarking organic, integrated and conventional sheep and beef farms. Research report number 06/07, ARGOS. Downloaded from www.argos.org.nz

Billiard (2005) Refrigerating equipment, energy efficiency and refrigerants. http://www.iifiir.org/en/doc/1059.pdf

Defra (2008) Guidelines to Defra's greenhouse gas conversion factors for company reporting. June 2008. Accessed from: http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/business/envrp/pdf/ghg-cf-guidelines2008.pdf

Garthwaite DG, Thomas MR, Parrish G, Smith L, Barker I (2011) Pesticide usage survey report 224. Arable crops in Great Britain 2008. http://www.fera.defra.gov.uk/plants/pesticideUsage/documents/arable2008.pdf

Goedkoop M, Oele M (2008) Introduction to LCA with SimaPro 7. Pre Consultant, Amersfoort, http://www.pre-sustainability.com/simapro-lca-software

Guinée JB, Gorrée M, Heijungs R, Huppes G, Kleijn R, Koning A de, Oers L van, Wegener Sleeswijk A, Suh S, Udo de Haes HA, Bruijn H de, Duin R van, Huijbregts MAJ (2002) Handbook on life cycle assessment. Operational guide to the ISO standards. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands

IPCC (2006) Draft 2006 IPCC guidelines for national greenhouse gas inventories

ISO (2006a) ISO 14040: Environmental management-Life cycle assessment-Principles and framework

ISO (2006b) ISO 14040: Environmental management-Life cycle assessment

Lillywhite R, Chandler D, Grant W, Lewis K, Firth C, Schmutz U, Halpin D (2007) Environmental footprint and sustainability of horticulture (including potatoes)-a comparison with other agricultural sectors. Final report of Defra project WQ0101

MAF (2006b) Sheep and beef monitoring report. A short-term financial and physical forecast reflecting farmer and industry perceptions of farming figures, trends and issues. July 2006. Downloaded from: www.maf.govt.nz/

MAF (Ministry of Agriculture and Food) (2006a) Pipfruit monitoring report a short-term financial and physical forecast reflecting grower and industry perceptions of pipfruit figures, trends and issues in Hawkes Bay and Nelson. April 2006 MAF. http://www.maf.govt.nz/mafnet/rural-nz/statistics-and-forecasts/farm-monitoring/

Mason R, Simons D, Peckham C, Wakeman T (2002) Life cycle modelling CO ₂ emissions for lettuce, apples and cherries. Report for Department of Transport. Executive summary available at: http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/freight/research/coll_lifecyclemodellingco2emissi/lifecyclemodellingco2emissio3226

Milà i Canals L (2003) Contributions to LCA methodology for agricultural systems. Site dependency and soil degradation impact assessment. PhD Thesis, Universitat Autònoma do Barcelona, Barcelona

Pimentel D, Pimentel M (1996) Food energy and society. CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group Boca Raton, FL, USA

Smith A, Watkiss P, Tweedle G, McKinnon A, Browne M, Hunt A, Treleven C, Naish C, Cross S (2005) The validity of food miles as an indicator of sustainable development. Report for Defra. http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/reports/foodmiles

Tukker A, Huppes G, Guinée J, Heijungs R, de Koning A, van Oers L, Suh S, Geerken T, Van Holderbeke M, Jansen B, Nielsen P, Eder P, Delgado L (2006) Environmental impact of products (EIPRO). Analysis of the life cycle environmental impacts related to the final consumption of the EU-25. European Commission Joint Research Centre, EUR 22284 EN, 136 pp. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/ipp/pdf/eipro_report.pdf

van Gijlswijk R, Coenen P, Pulles T, van der Sluijs J (2004) Uncertainty assessment of NOx, SO ₂ and NH ₃ emissions in the Netherlands. Rapport nr. R 2004/100. TNO Environment, Energy and Process Innovation, Apeldoorn

Google Scholar

Warner DJ, Davies M, Hipps N, Osborne N, Tzilivakis J, Lewis KA (2010) Greenhouse gas emissions and energy use in UK-grown short-day strawberry ( Fragaria xananassa Duch) crops. J Agric Sci 148:667-681

Article CAS Google Scholar

Williams AG (2007) Comparative study of cut roses for the British market produced in Kenya and the Netherlands. Cranfield University, Cranfield, Report for World Flowers

Download references

Acknowledgments

Many people provided data and contributed to developing the methodology. In particular, we thank Paul Watkiss and Martin Palmer, Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, Meat Services (AHDBMS); P. Cook and RL Consulting, poultry production in Brazil; and Ø. Buhaug, Norwegian Marine Technology Research Institute (Marintek). Funding from Defra is also gratefully acknowledged.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. Ricardo-AEA, Gemini Building, Harwell Business Centre, Didcot, Oxfordshire, OX11 0QR, UK

J Webb & Emma Hope

2. School of Applied Sciences, Cranfield University, Building 42, Cranfield, Bedfordshire, MK43 0AL, UK

Adrian G. Williams

3. Beef Production Systems Ltd., Huntingdon, UK

David Evans

4. Moorhouse Consulting, London, UK

Ed Moorhouse

Corresponding author

Correspondence to J Webb.

Additional information

Responsible editor: Gérard Gaillard

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

About this article

Cite this article

Webb, J., Williams, A.G., Hope, E. et al. Do foods imported into the UK have a greater environmental impact than the same foods produced within the UK?. Int J Life Cycle Assess 18, 1325-1343 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-013-0576-2
Download citation

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Get shareable link

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Keywords

Eutrophication

Food

Global warming potential

Greenhouse gases

Imports

Life cycle assessment

Water use

Buy single article

Instant access to the full article PDF.

USD 39.95

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Buy single article

Instant access to the full article PDF.

USD 39.95

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Do foods imported into the UK have a greater environmental impact than the same foods produced within the UK? - The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Purpose This study of seven foods assessed whether there are modes or locations of production that require significantly fewer inputs, and hence cause less pollution, than others. For example, would increasing imports of field-grown tomatoes from the Mediterranean reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by reducing the need for production in heated greenhouses in the UK, taking account of the additional transport emissions?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This story appears in the September 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.

In a potato field near the Netherlands' border with Belgium, Dutch farmer Jacob van den Borne is seated in the cabin of an immense harvester before an instrument panel worthy of the starship Enterprise.

From his perch 10 feet above the ground, he's monitoring two drones-a driverless tractor roaming the fields and a quadcopter in the air-that provide detailed readings on soil chemistry, water content, nutrients, and growth, measuring the progress of every plant down to the individual potato. Van den Borne's production numbers testify to the power of this "precision farming," as it's known. The global average yield of potatoes per acre is about nine tons. Van den Borne's fields reliably produce more than 20.

That copious output is made all the more remarkable by the other side of the balance sheet: inputs. Almost two decades ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry "Twice as much food using half as many resources." Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by as much as 90 percent. They've almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses, and since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by as much as 60 percent.

One more reason to marvel: The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country, with more than 1,300 inhabitants per square mile. It's bereft of almost every resource long thought to be necessary for large-scale agriculture. Yet it's the globe's number two exporter of food as measured by value, second only to the United States, which has 270 times its landmass. How on Earth have the Dutch done it?

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.

The brain trust behind these astounding numbers is centered at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), located 50 miles southeast of Amsterdam. Widely regarded as the world's top agricultural research institution, WUR is the nodal point of Food Valley, an expansive cluster of agricultural technology start-ups and experimental farms. The name is a deliberate allusion to California's Silicon Valley, with Wageningen emulating the role of Stanford University in its celebrated merger of academia and entrepreneurship.

Ernst van den Ende, managing director of WUR's Plant Sciences Group, embodies Food Valley's blended approach. A renowned scholar with the casual manner of a barista at a hip café, van den Ende is a world authority on plant pathology. But, he says, "I'm not simply a college dean. Half of me runs Plant Sciences, but the other half oversees nine separate business units involved in commercial contract research." Only that mix, "the science-driven in tandem with the market-driven," he maintains, "can meet the challenge that lies ahead."

The challenge? Put in bluntly apocalyptic terms, he says, the planet must produce "more food in the next four decades than all farmers in history have harvested over the past 8,000 years."

That's because by 2050, the Earth will be home to as many as 10 billion people, up from today's 7.5 billion. If massive increases in agricultural yield are not achieved, matched by massive decreases in the use of water and fossil fuels, a billion or more people may face starvation. Hunger could be the 21st century's most urgent problem, and the visionaries working in Food Valley believe they have found innovative solutions. The wherewithal to stave off catastrophic famine is within reach, van den Ende insists. His optimism rests on feedback from more than a thousand WUR projects in more than 140 countries and on its formal pacts with governments and universities on six continents to share advances and implement them.

A conversation with van den Ende is a white-knuckle ride on a torrent of brainstorms, statistics, and predictions. African drought? "Water isn't the fundamental problem. It's poor soil," he says. "The absence of nutrients can be offset by cultivating plants that act in symbiosis with certain bacteria to produce their own fertilizer." The soaring cost of grain to feed animals? "Feed them grasshoppers instead," he says. One hectare of land yields one metric ton of soy protein, a common livestock feed, a year. The same amount of land can produce 150 tons of insect protein.

The conversation rushes on to the use of LED lighting to permit 24-hour cultivation in precisely climate-controlled greenhouses. It then detours to a misconception that sustainable agriculture means minimal human intervention in nature.

"Look at the island of Bali!" he exclaims. For at least a thousand years, its farmers have raised ducks and fish within the same flooded paddies where rice is cultivated. It's an entirely self-contained food system, irrigated by intricate canal systems along mountain terraces sculpted by human hands.

"There's your model of sustainability," van den Ende says.

At every turn in the Netherlands, the future of sustainable agriculture is taking shape-not in the boardrooms of big corporations but on thousands of modest family farms. You see it vividly in the terrestrial paradise of Ted Duijvestijn and his brothers Peter, Ronald, and Remco. Like the Balinese, the Duijvestijns have constructed a self-contained food system in which a near-perfect balance prevails between human ingenuity and nature's potential.

At the Duijvestijns' 36-acre greenhouse complex near the old city of Delft, visitors stroll among ranks of deep green tomato vines, 20 feet tall. Rooted not in soil but in fibers spun from basalt and chalk, the plants are heavy with tomatoes-15 varieties in all-to suit the taste of the most demanding palate. In 2015 an international jury of horticultural experts named the Duijvestijns the world's most innovative tomato growers.

Since relocating and restructuring their 70-year-old farm in 2004, the Duijvestijns have declared resource independence on every front. The farm produces almost all of its own energy and fertilizer and even some of the packaging materials necessary for the crop's distribution and sale. The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands.

The only irrigation source is rainwater, says Ted, who manages the cultivation program. Each kilogram of tomatoes from his fiber-rooted plants requires less than four gallons of water, compared with 16 gallons for plants in open fields. Once each year the entire crop is regrown from seeds, and the old vines are processed to make packaging crates. The few pests that manage to enter the Duijvestijn greenhouses are greeted by a ravenous army of defenders such as the fierce Phytoseiulus persimilis, a predatory mite that shows no interest in tomatoes but gorges itself on hundreds of destructive spider mites.

A few days before I visited the Duijvestijns' operation, Ted had attended a meeting of farmers and researchers at Wageningen. "This is how we come up with innovative ways to move ahead, to keep improving," he told me. "People from all over Holland get together to discuss different perspectives and common goals. No one knows all the answers on their own."

The search for answers to a life-or-death question gave rise to one of the Netherlands' most innovative companies. Half a century ago, Jan Koppert was growing cucumbers on his land and using toxic chemical sprays to fend off pests. When a physician declared him allergic to pesticides, Koppert set out to learn all he could about the natural enemies of insects and arachnids.

Today Koppert Biological Systems is the global pacesetter in biological pest and disease control, with 1,330 employees and 26 international subsidiaries marketing its products in 96 countries. Koppert's firm can provide you with cotton bags of ladybug larvae that mature into voracious consumers of aphids. Or how about a bottle containing 2,000 of those predatory mites that hunt down spider mites on plants and suck them dry? Or a box of 500 million nematodes that mount deadly assaults on fly larvae that prey on commercial mushrooms?

Koppert's legions make love as well as war, in the guise of enthusiastic bumblebees. No form of artificial pollination matches the efficiency of bees buzzing from flower to flower, gathering nectar to nourish their queen and helping to fertilize the ovaries of plants along the way. Each Koppert hive accounts for daily visits to half a million flowers. Farmers using the bees typically report 20 to 30 percent increases in yields and fruit weight, for less than half the cost of artificial pollination.

Nowhere is the Netherlands' agricultural technology more cutting-edge than in the embryonic organism in which most food is literally rooted: seeds. And nowhere are the controversies that surround the future of agriculture more heated. Chief among them is the development of genetically modified organisms to produce larger and more pest-resistant crops. To their critics, GMOs conjure up a Frankenstein scenario, fraught with uncertainty about the consequences of radical experimentation with living entities.

Dutch firms are among the world leaders in the seed business, with close to $1.7 billion worth of exports in 2016. Yet they market no GMO products. A new seed variety in Europe's heavily regulated GMO arena can cost a hundred million dollars and require 12 to 14 years of research and development, according to KeyGene's Arjen van Tunen. By contrast, the latest achievements in the venerable science of molecular breeding-which introduces no foreign genes-can deliver remarkable gains in five to 10 years, with development costs as low as $100,000 and seldom more than a million dollars. It is a direct descendant of methods employed by farmers in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago.

The sales catalog of Rijk Zwaan, another Dutch breeder, offers high-yield seeds in more than 25 broad groups of vegetables, many that defend themselves naturally against major pests. Heleen Bos is responsible for the company's organic accounts and international development projects. She might be expected to dwell on the fact that a single high-tech Rijk Zwaan greenhouse tomato seed, priced below $0.50, has been known to produce a mind-boggling 150 pounds of tomatoes. Instead she talks about the hundreds of millions of people, most of them women and children, who lack sufficient food.

Like many of the entrepreneurs at Food Valley firms, Bos has worked in the fields and cities of the world's poorest nations. With lengthy postings to Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Bangladesh over the past 30 years, she knows that hunger and devastating famine are not abstract threats.

"Of course, we can't immediately implement the kind of ultrahigh-tech agriculture over there that you see in the Netherlands," she says. "But we are well into introducing medium-tech solutions that can make a huge difference." She cites the proliferation of relatively inexpensive plastic greenhouses that have tripled some crop yields compared with those of open fields, where crops are more subject to pests and drought.

Since 2008 Rijk Zwaan has supported a breeding program in Tanzania at a 50-acre trial field in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. Its seeds are sent to Holland for quality control tests on germination rates, purity, and resistance to pests and diseases. Collaborative projects are under way in Kenya, Peru, and Guatemala. "We try to develop seeds for their specific conditions," Bos says. But the starting point, she adds emphatically, cannot be the sort of top-down approach that has doomed many well-meaning foreign aid projects.

"We have constant, tremendously important conversations with the small growers themselves-on their needs, on the weather and soil conditions they face, on costs," she says.

For some Dutch researchers, concern for people threatened by hunger stems in part from a national trauma: The Netherlands was the last Western country to suffer a serious famine, when 10,000 to 20,000 people died in German-occupied lands during the final year of World War II. Decades later, WUR's Rudy Rabbinge, professor emeritus of sustainable development and food security, took up the cause when he helped devise extensive changes in the faculty, student body, and curriculum that transformed the institution into what he calls "a university for the world, and not simply for the Dutch." Today a hefty share of the academic and research activities at WUR are focused on problems facing poor nations.

Some 45 percent of its graduate students-including nearly two-thirds of all Ph.D. candidates-are recruited abroad, representing more than a hundred nations. Asians, led by Chinese and Indonesians, outnumber almost all non-Dutch Europeans combined. WUR alumni are found in the highest echelons of agricultural ministries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

In a campus cafeteria, I sit down with three of WUR's most promising students, a description that, not long ago, would have meant male and Dutch born. All three are young women, hailing from Uganda, Nepal, and Indonesia.

"I met a Wageningen alumna when I was an undergrad in Uganda," Leah Nandudu tells me when I ask how she wound up here. "She was an expert on phenotyping," the advanced studies that paint a detailed portrait of a plant's traits and potential. "It inspired me to discover that an African could do these things. She was the future; she was where we need to go."

The meeting eventually led Nandudu to a WUR scholarship. Her father farms three acres, split between coffee and bananas. Her mother teaches English in a primary school and helps in the field. "We have all the problems farmers face everywhere today, only much worse, especially due to the consequences of climate change."

Pragya Shrestha was raised in the Nepali countryside, some parts of which have been wracked by years of reliance on pesticides and fertilizers. Sounder, sustainable methods have made few inroads so far.

"It's a political problem," she says. New cultivation methods can't be implemented because of a shortage of public funding. "It's also a population problem, the fragmentation of the land into smaller and smaller parcels, suitable only for the use of inefficient human labor and generating very little income."

Renna Eliana Warjoto is from Bandung, the third largest city in Indonesia. "People are mistrustful of ideas that come from abroad," she says, as Shrestha and Nandudu nod in agreement. "Farmers are so used to having marginal lives and incomes," she adds, "that they have a hard time believing things could be different."

In 1944-45 a lethal famine struck the island of Java, where Bandung is located, killing some 2.4 million people. Devastating regional crop failures have haunted Indonesia as recently as 2005. Food supplies periodically run out in rural Nepal because of drought and high prices on essential imports. In 2011 a famine in the Horn of Africa affected 13 million people, and in 2017 1.6 million Ugandans face starvation without rapid assistance from abroad. All these events were unimaginable at the time, yet they pale in comparison to what could lie ahead. The number of people menaced by famine in just three African nations and across the Red Sea in Yemen exceeds 20 million today and is rising inexorably, according to the United Nations. "We are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the UN," the organization's emergency relief coordinator, Stephen O'Brien, warned in March.

"Our most difficult task is changing the perceptions of our own people-about the crisis we confront and what we must do to address it," Nandudu says. "That's my job when I go home. We cannot turn our faces away from reality."

Some 4,000 miles south of Wageningen, in a family-owned bean field in Africa's Eastern Rift Valley, a team from SoilCares, a Dutch agricultural technology firm, explains the functions of a small handheld device. In conjunction with a cell phone app, the device analyzes the soil's pH, organic matter, and other properties, then uploads the results to a database in the Netherlands and returns a detailed report on optimal fertilizer use and nutrient needs-all in less than 10 minutes. At a cost of a few dollars, the report provides input that can help reduce crop losses by enormous margins to farmers who have never had access to soil sampling of any kind.

Less than 5 percent of the world's estimated 570 million farms have access to a soil lab. That's the kind of number the Dutch see as a challenge.

"What does our work mean for developing countries? That question is always raised here," says Martin Scholten, who directs WUR's Animal Sciences Group. "It's part of every conversation."

Frank Viviano, a foreign correspondent based in Italy, has covered stories in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Luca Locatelli specializes in photographing interactions between people and technology.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant by showing what the future of farming could look like.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Organic Matters Podcast - Irish Organic Association

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teagasc Organic Farm Walk - Kildinan Farm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Direct Selling of Organic Produce - Webinar

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Share your videos with friends, family, and the world