> it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e

Your pig farmers must be thrilled.

I am very conflicted on a carbon tax for the agriculture industry. It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor thin margins. The transition from regenerative agriculture is expensive & rising food costs has a destabilizing effect.

There need to be changes, but I am not convinced that this will have the desired effects. Its quite possible this leads to a net conversion of farmland to residential or commercial property rather than nature.

It’s always better to go to the source to avoid misinterpretation

Interesting historical perspective

On the other hand Tican is doing pretty well and are hiring, while Danish Crown is firing. So at least some of the pigs which would normally go to Danish Crown, is being sent to Tican instead. Tican is also giving farmers a better price per pig. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/seneste/mens-danish-crown-lider-lo...

Danish Crowns problems aren't entirely due to external factors, part of it is also that Danish Crowns is struggling to run its business properly.

Meat is too cheap and resource intensive. A market correction has been incoming for decades.

Because the pigs get transported alive to Germany and Poland to get slaughtered, as wages are lower there. Denmark, with a population under six million, still produces 32 million pigs per annum.

Good.

There are such a thing as tariffs. I think it makes sense that we both improve our local environment and adopt a carrot/stick approach to businesses in other localities that do/don't do the same. Same environmental standards with independent audit should grant (eco) tariff-free access. Likewise, wasteful environmentally destructive exporter = heavy tariff.

Shifting production to less regulated countries like China is not going to fix climate change.

Before anyone jumps into this book I would caution against it. This book had many very cool ideas and moments. The way it played out felt very "real". However, in the end there was very little actual story and was very boring at times. I actively dislike Neal Stephenson but if you want a near-future climate story I would recommend Termination Shock over Ministry For The Future. Just a random internet person's two cents.

And in case they choose "no", that carbon tax for farm animals help to think second time.

Denmark drained the only source of natural diversity it had, its marshlands, after World War I and turned the entire country into farmland. Outside the cities, it is endless fields of farmland. And now its chickens have come home to roost, having poisoned the soil and rivers. This is entirely Denmark's fault, and now they're trying to reverse some of the damage they did.

Haiti cut down all their trees. When a hurricane passes through it moves what little top soil they have into the ocean.[1] Haiti overfished their costal waters. Now they do not have fish to eat and worse can not participate in the single biggest economic driver in the Caribbean, scuba diving.

Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s. [2]]

[1] https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/08/05/us-funded-trees...

[2] https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl

Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark can easily let go of 10% while only having miniscule effects on the economy. Denmark is a very small country and technically has no truly wild nature.

A lot of “farmland” is unproductive and kept in usage only by heavy subsidies. Additionally, I think a more important/interesting part of the article is taxation of livestock - you reduce the land needed significantly when the amount of livestock is reduced. I’m not vegan/vegetarian but it is “obvious” we should reduce meat consumption for a wide range of reasons and focus on raising livestock in ways that are beneficial to the wider environment.

Because there's nothing else? 60% of Denmark is farmed land, most of the rest is cities, industry, or suburbs.

Just having farmland be fields is not very good for the land or the eco system. Breaking up farmland with hedges, woods, wetlands or whatever nature decides it should be is often a good idea. Next best thing is to manually plant trees.

Edit: add planting trees

> why Farmland?

Because trees don't grow well in the ocean? :)

There is developed areas (cities/towns/industry) and farm land.

Most of the land not suitable for farming was turned into farm land. Through extremely hard work over the past 150 years. Like straightening rivers, draining marshes, and planting up the heath.

the Netherlands exports so much food (and meat...) that it becomes a burden on local wildlife and milieu, mostly due to nitrogen emissions, pesticides and fertilizer.

I think it's the same for Denmark, though the mostly hold pigs in stead of cattle.

Where else would you like them to plant trees? Tearing up residential areas to convert to forest would be massively expensive and likely unpopular.

Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land. What I mean is that if we removed the subsidies the farmers wouldn’t farm their land, the market just doesn’t work to support their production. So we are essentially saying “if you pretend to farm your land we’ll make sure you profit” but even at that they of cause need to try to keep the pretend farming profitable enough that the entire charade pays off, but that means dumping a ton of fertilizer on the land, which tends to run off and ruin streams and seeps into the ground water. Most recently this has led to the agricultural industry competeley and likely semi permanently destroying the fishing industry around one of the major pars of Denmark. So at this point the farmers have to stop.

There’s a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political power because they have a lot of money because of the policies they’ve set up back when they had political power because they had a lot of money… Anyways, so what is actually happening is that the farmers have decided that if their land is unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to them for it.

The government could just cut the subsidies which means we would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely just with the money we spend less. Instead we’ll see a lot of additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line subsidies will increase to “make up” for all the land they “lost”.

I think that there is an official and an unofficial reason. The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything. The unofficial is, in my opinion, that EU politicians are terrified by US elections.

In all western countries, far right groups are crawling to grab more and more power gradually. Those groups feed basically on farmer followers, ruthlessly brainwashed with fake news, antiscience and outrage, and the system has proven to work well (See US).

Until now traditional parties believed that could control the situation and appease the farmers with more money, and maybe even benefit of some votes of grateful people on return. The wake up has being brutal. Each euro given to farmers is just a victory reclaimed by this groups, that nurture a higher discontent.

So now that they are coming for they political heads and the time is running out, traditional politicians feel the pressure to take some delayed unpleasant decisions before is too late, and getting rid of the fake farmers to build a market from there is a first step. If fake farmers can sell subsidized meat for a lower price, the real farmers suffer for it.

Rage mode over more forest? Are you a psycho?

> Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it.

And both are tiny and being swarmed by sustainability issues.

We pay farmers not to plant fields in the US. Here in the Eastern half, much of this farm land setting idle receives adequate rain and sunshine. Farmers have to mow (brush hog) the fields every year or two to prevent trees and brush from naturally taking over. Economically it makes little sense.

Where this might actually make sense is around waterways to prevent erosion. And farmers have taken down a large percentage of the tree rows between fields that were planted in the dust bowl days in an effort to use every inch of their field.

Although, I am personally in favor of simple regulations instead cash handouts.

Because Denmark is almost entirely cities and farmland?

There’s already a housing crisis…

I'm of the opinion food security - even at great expense - is the primary thing a nation should be concerned with as a society. At the level where producing enough calories to feed your total population if things truly hit the fan as a hard requirement for every nation on the planet. This is not something you leave to "free trade" or whatnot. Obviously that doesn't mean every calorie need be provided in the most luxurious form - but in the end, there should be enough food produced to feed your people in the worst of times. Even at great expense and waste during the good times.

That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years. Logically we simply do not need the same amount of land devoted to agriculture as we did before - at least in most cases.

So long as your food security is not being impacted - and I do mean under the worst possible stress model you can come up with - I don't see a problem with plans like this. Land use changes over time, and it should be expected.

Plus, it looks like a large portion of this will be simply a different form of agriculture - forestry. This will probably be more in-demand in 50-100 years with current trends, but that's a wild guess.

Not all farm land is productive, so converting it back to forests and uncultivated land is better overall for the country.

I presume the EU has an excess. A lot of land is 'set aside' where you get an EU subsidy for not farming it so we don't end up with too much food.

Simple: Germany has a huge export surplus that China and the USA is unwilling to accept anymore.

Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South America for exports while balancing it with import of South American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process, but by the Commission).

The problem Germany has to fix is the Common Agricultural Policy, that's one of the pillars of the EU. They are using the Green Agenda to force countries to reforest their fields. Of course the whole reforestation program is designed in a way that benefits states (Germany) that have got rid of their forests long time ago, and is unfavorable for countries that developed their agriculture after the WW2 - like Denmark and Finland.

Expect a heated discussion between Germany and France, rise of right wing parties in smaller countries, and a push for stricter integration.

https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/11/19/eu-mercosur-tra...

https://forest.fi/article/whos-to-pay-the-cost-of-eus-nature...

https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leadi...

Nitrogen emissions from farming are a big topic in the Netherlands. We have a right wing populist governments that wants to raise maximum speeds back to 130km/h but they can't because of nitrogen emissions that caused the previous government (also right leaning, pro car, etc.) to lower the limits. Intense cattle farming is a big environmental challenge in both countries and it comes at a price. Lots of farting cows in both countries.

Farmland is not some natural balanced healthy state for the land to exist in.

There is no way it's cost effective to produce food in Denmark. If people were rational about this Denmark would be 0-5% farmland. But racism/nationalism and irrational fears and entrenched political power exists so these sane changes only happen slowly. This is a country whose largest imports are (fish, animal feed, wine and cheese) and mostly from other European countries. If they were really worried about min-maxing they would be trading with other countries. They seem to be more preoccupied with keeping cash inside Europe and confusing old world status symbols with wealth.

It's as if your economic planning is based own how good it appears to a potential time traveler from 100 years ago

"The people work 30 hours a week and eat wine and cheese whenever they want! Everybody is rich!"

The Danish agricultural industry accounts for 1% of GDP and almost 70% of land use, the highest in the world. The Wikipedia page on Denmark doesn't even bother to list it as a major industry (unlike Lego) and the only figures I could find put it at around 8B DKK. Lego does 66B DKK on its own.

What criteria are you using?

(Dane here) - this is a major reversal on the food-security policy that drove not just innovation in intensive farming technologies in Denmark in the late nineteenth century, but also the formation of what is now the EU, post WWII, on a european scale.

Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.

> A growing population require food.

Sure, but Europe's not growing. It is purely in "shrink forever" mode. This is easily measured, any time fertility drops below 2.1 that's what happens. But ignore that a moment, what if you wanted to depopulate Europe? This might be a good policy for that. Get the timing just right, and it's not even a genocide... food shortages that don't starve anyone just encourages the last few breeders to put a lid on it, and voila! The fantasy of more than a few out there.

Yes, some of the forests will be untouched nature but a good chunk of it will be for timber production.

This upcoming administration won't though.

Indeed. A few years ago I ran across a comparison of old photographs of rural villages (early 20th century) in central Europe vs their present day appearance, taken from similar points of view.

Two things were immediately apparent from the old photographs - less forest - tons of fruit trees

Fitting is also this anecdote I heard when visiting a historical mill. They had a huge linden tree in their yard, and they told us that in the olden days this was a symbol of prosperity, because the original owner showed off that they could afford to plant a useless, non-fruit-bearing - a status symbol.

Coming full circle - the best thing would be if we could plant tons of trees that also produce food - something like the baobabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_digitata . E.g. pigs were fed oak's acorns in fall.

It’s the same in America, there’s actually more trees now than at the time of European settlement. A combo of the large buffalo herds that used to roam and native land management that often involved burning entire forests.

In comparison, Denmark is currently at only 15% forest.

This is up from about 2% in the early 1800s, back when ships were built from wood, and firewood was used for heating. Funnily, the slow and steady build-up during those 200 years was partially motivated by the fact that when the British destroyed the fleet in 1807, there was simply not enough wood to build a new one.

Climate getting milder has also meant the tree line, and thus forest line, has moved up quite a lot[1].

[1]: https://www.forskning.no/norges-forskningsrad-partner-miljoo...

Just open google maps and take a stroll across europe...

Is there a reason you and some many commenters here are concerned about food security? Has this became a nativist rallying cry of some sort? Because by all fact-based accounts there is no problem with food production in Europe.

Food security is not an issue at all. For example in Germany around 20% of all farmland is used for "energy plants" (biogas etc.). Even in Germany solar planels have around a 28 times higher efficiency per area than biogas plants, so there is a lot of potential to repurpose farm land without changing food production at all.

> that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is an attempt at subjugating the people

Well, it is. More expensive food means a worse quality of life for normal people. It also means more time spent working to pay for groceries, and less time and money to do things that threaten the elites like accumulating capital or performing activism.

Feeding people is a sacred task. Food is literally the base pillar of various human needs pyramids.

shitlibs' contempt for farmers of all people is a real mask off moment

Believe me the farmers have been doing their best to buck this.

There are already tree harvesters that start with a standing tree and end on a ready log with waste mulched. It's only a matter of time it's AI controlled.

The future has no jobs.

Using seedballs, you could conceivably plant 1B trees in just a couple months by dropping the seedballs from airplanes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBbU4MQftc8

It would take a couple of years at the scale Finnish forest industry is operating.

Large parts of Europe are basically forests that have been temporarily cut down. If you let the land be, the forest will often grow back with minimal effort.

Saplings? Wouldn't it be easier to seed? Or you could plant a few more mature trees sparsely and rely on them to seed?

The trees will ride through floods and reduce water flows, improve species diversity for insects, birds, small mammals, improve temperatures and ameliorate winds, provide shelter for farm animals, can enhance grazing. And there's wood to harvest in due course.

There's a lot more reasons to plant trees than direct AGW offset.

A huge amount of farmland is now surplus to production. Grasses and fields of weeds aren't always ideal. Taking land out of production can also attract offset funding for farmers (-yes, this is a secondary economic outcome and may also incur other costs)

People are healthier around trees. People like trees. Even Bill Gates may actually like trees.

If you burn the wood, sure. Forests only capture carbon if you leave that carbon alone forever.

Denmark isn't just trying to reduce their CO2 footprint, though. It's also dealing with terrible soil and water quality, both the result of many years of hyper-intensive farming. That's a local problem that needs local policy to solve.

Trees absolutely can help with climate change, although like everything in this universe, there are nuances at play, such as type of tree, location, etc.

We have done a lot of deforestation, and that absolutely has negatively impacted our climate, and we should work to reverse it.

And he’d be right.

When those trees die and then rot or burn, that CO2 will be released right back into the atmosphere. They’ll temporarily hold some, yeah, but it’s like trying to rapidly fire a squirt gun at a fire when someone else is spraying it with a firehose of gasoline.

Especially because trees plant themselves. If they want to set aside the land for forest and seed it a little to get going - great - but those large tree planting operations are a waste of time at best or carbon credit loopholes at worst.

He also once said that 640KB should be enough for anyone, so ... let's take his opinion with a grain of salt. Affluence does not equal wisdom.

You could plant a trillion trees tomorrow but it won't help anything so long as places like China and India pollute the oceans with millions of tones of plastic waste trash every year. That's in the thousands of tones per day region. The sheer scale of pollution there makes Denmark's measly little contribution just that, peanuts. No wonder the farmers are upset. They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.

Denmark exports a lot of the produced food, and we are one of the most intensely farmed countries in the world, 60.4% of Denmark consists of fields, and 48% of Denmark's land area is used to grow food for animals, animals which are primarily pigs.

We also yearly import 1.8 million tons of soy from South America to feed said pigs, because we can't grow enough food for them ourselves.

It would be nice to have some nature to walk in, it's something I miss here and something there's a lot of in England, and it's great combined with their public footpath system!

A big percentage of the land usage are to grow crops to feed animals to feed us.

If we bring back our meat consumption (especially beef) to something more balanced for our health we can free-up a massive amount of surface.

I'm not saying that everyone should be vegetarian or vegan. I'm following the notes of the IPCC and studies that says that we can, and should, reduce some of our meat consumption and get those proteines from all the many other sources (peas, tofu...).

Beef is the coal of food. Lets progress to something more efficient, dense and good for our environment and our health.

They are already massively subsidized and this will only increase their subsidies. In Denmark farmers control government similarly to the way big oil abd gunmakers control government in the US.