are you being obtuse?

> "Like all the others, he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop. Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms, even when the crop no longer gave him any cash. Then, like all the others, he had got into debt with the banks. And finally, like all the others, he had learned that what the experts had been saying for a generation was perfectly true : in a semi-arid country it is grass that holds down the soil; tear up the grass, the soil will go. In due course, it had gone.

The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the experience was making a worse man of him."

-- Aldous Huxley, "After Many a Year Dies the Swan" -- 1939

They were warned what would happen. Yes, it was the grasses that keep the soil in place.

However, as the article you referenced says,

> "As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and promoted new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion." [2]

A bunch of people didn't understand this in Haiti and now they are severely doomed and suffering. Probably not something you want to be incorrect about on the global scale.

Although, it is the grasses that hold the top soil in place, it can be mitigated by planting trees.

So is that relevant because it means that cutting down all the trees want their fault, or because it provides an alternate explanation for what mechanism is causing the soil to else?

And obviously the connection to Denmark is meant to be that a lack of trees causes problems so replacing things with trees must be good. Even if there hasn't been news about those problems happening there.

You'd think that people would have realized this after Europe avoided mass death from Russian gas being cut off only because the winter was mild.

Resistance to a blockade doesn’t require subsidies for growing flowers etc.

Subsidizing exports similarly has very different goals.

I think you meant financial

Let me get this right. To save the planet Denmark wants to stop producing food locally and instead import more? So those pig farts gotta go but the bunker fuel used to ship grain from a slash and burn rainforest farm in Brazil is a-ok.

Utterly brain dead. So much so that you know someone’s getting paid from these decisions.

> specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded

No, its because far lobbies are an important political block

i admit that i haven't read the sources listed here

https://www.dyrenesbeskyttelse.dk/artikler/landbrugets-bundl...

and also that this source is probably biased toward minimizing the numbers while your source might be pulling in the other direction. the true number is probably somewhere in between and depends on what you include. like, could the raw products be imported instead and the refined in Denmark without those 22% taking a hit?

yes, but like 50-70% of the crops grown is animal feed. if Denmark really needed efficient food for the population i think the whole thing could be done more efficiently and those 10% won't be missed.

Could food security in case of another global crisis be a good enough reason? I don't know anything about the British situation AT ALL, but I think many in Europe think slightly different about the market-based solution when it comes to both food, medicines, and other essentials after corona.

It turns out that when shit hits the fan, countries need to handle the basic needs of their population themselves.

For a short period I looked into carbon stuff and while forests were good, wetlands were deemed much bigger sinks.

It feels like wetlands is a huge ignored area. If what I read at the time holds (I think it was like 6-12x sequestration rate in some regions), a simple thing like rising sea levels would have a huge impact.

And anthropogenic destruction of wetlands is also a huge issue and one that is relatively easy to reverse in a lot cases (dams, rerouted rivers). And in some cases, water can just be rerouted occasionally to create temperarly wetlands that are good ecosystems as well. Mossy Earth I think is doing some of these.

I do a lot of volunteering work with the Woodland Trust in the UK, negotiating with people who want to donate their land to restoration purposes. Britain is a land of fields and hedgerows (distributed). Many people fail to understand that most "wilderness" that we want to bring back is reliant on density (or concentration). I know many land owners who want to rewild parts of theirs, but are expecting temperate rainforest on a plot of land a couple acres across. It doesn't work like that.

The only way to bring back these lost or dying ecosystems is across large stretches of land, hundreds if not thousands of acres across. We have tiny pockets left in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, but for the most part the country is ecologically baren in comparison to that a couple of thousand years ago.

Vast and continuous National Parks are one of the few viable ways to maintain or bring back our species rich ecosystems. Distributed "wilderness" between city blocks or cattle grazing land is duct tape on a leaky bucket.

Quick history lesson: After the war, with Prussia in 1864, Denmark lost about 33% of it's area. That part was some of the most suited to agriculture. To compensate for those loses Denmark started a process of turning previously unusable land in to farmland. So lakes where drained, the the moors were drained, areas with sandy soil, good for nothing but growing common heather, was heavily fertilised and forests where cut down. There where even suggestion to drain parts of the sea between Denmark and Sweden.

In some sense it was good, and basically help shape modern Denmark, but it's just not needed anymore, and has come at the cost of wildlife, native plants and sea creatures. It didn't start out like that, but when you add modern intensive farming on top of killing of most of your nature areas, then things starts to go very wrong. Denmark has almost nothing of it's original nature left.

> just maybe not in Denmark

exactly, and we're talking about Denmark, after all

That last bit is correct, there aren’t many places like that in Denmark. So the original question remains, where would be a better place for them specifically to plant these trees?

Not really. Trees plant themselves. If it’s not being actively used for something/mowed it’ll turn back into forest.

> It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.

That’s tempting even with subsidies. I have friend who own farming land at the outskirts of the city, they rent it to a farmer at almost net zero to themselves after taxes, but would make a small fortune if they could develop the land. The reason farmers don’t sell their land to real estate and 100x the value instantly isn’t that they don’t want to because of subsidies, it’s that they aren’t allowed to due to zoning laws, and zoning laws are what they are to protect property values, because everyone involved in designing them own at minimum one property. The only political party we have representing renters in any capacity never get any power in the governmental bodies that govern zoning laws.

> The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset.

Nothing about that required the current setup. Imagine if we were talking about government subsidies for private militias because we needed to maintain the much more directly important military capacity. Wouldn’t that be crazy? Why is the farming subsidies seen differently. Why must the government pay to private institutions who’s worth had disappeared. If we want governments to maintain farmable land so be it. We don’t have to finically support an artificial elite based them having owned a one profitable asset. Just let it degrade in value and buy it when it hits bottom.

With this type of argument you can demonstrate that lots of things have strategic importance. Steel? Check. Textiles? Check. Asphalt? Check. We should subsidize everything. Yet, when the military threat actually materializes and you need to manufacture 155mm shells, all the strategic planning seems quite useless.

To be more accurate - by removing subsidies, NZ farmers became more efficient and sell their products at the world price, which is quite often overseas.

Subsidies and/or tarrifs always distort the market and have unintended consequences.

So the public gives them their hard-earned money via taxes, and the farmers reap more money from exporting?

Well they aren’t really subsidizing based on having everything you need on shore. They still specilize into a few monocrops and have to trade to fill the rest of a balanced diet for the population. No one is calculating how much butter would be needed to last a multi year siege and dolling out subsidize to the dairy farmers on that I don’t think.

There’s a big difference between supporting food security and subsidising otherwise unviable land usage and farming practices. In the UK, there are subsidies for upland farming for sheep with produces a negligible amount of food at high cost (monetary and environmental) for next to no return for the farmers even after the subsidy.

Re. green subsidies that is better characterised as investment in technology of the future. You might also like to compare subsidies to the fossil fuel sector as well.

How does having such a large surplus that you’re an exporter of food jive with national security? It sounds like they already produce more than enough. Exposing food production entirely to market forces is, as you point out, a bad idea.

Destroying fisheries goes directly against food security. Fishes are more efficient as source of food by energetic reasons.

> Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.

The green subsidies are also paid out to farmers… it is outrageous. Imagine if we were still paying subsidies to weavers because of their “strategic importance in case of war” and also paying them green subsidies to avoid using the toxic chemicals they would otherwise use doing the thing they are only doing in the first place because it justifies the theater that has the state maintaining their consistent income.

This is often the justification but in many countries agriculture systems are not oriented towards food security: they produce a large share of export crops/products and thus also rely on imports. If they were an actual national security tool, they would be more focus on not relying on imports and not helping exports, right?

> Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.

It's absurd to not acknowledge they are both.

> Denmark is not even close to jeopardizing its food supply, even less its food security. It produces way more food than is needed to feed its own population.

Denmark is a part of the EU. Their agricultural policy follows EU's common agricultural policy. Food security is evaluated accounting for all members, not individual member-states in isolation. In case of a scenario that puts food security at risk, such as an all-out war, it's in her best interests of all member states if the whole Europe can preserve it's food security.

The math here is quite simple.

A single cow can produce around 250 to 500 liters of methane per day through belching and farting. Let's take an average of 400 liters/day. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.

400 liters/day × 365 days = 146,000 liters/year.

Convert to kilograms (since methane’s density is ~0.656 kg/m³):

146,000 liters = 146 m³ → 146 × 0.656 kg = 95.8 kg of methane/year per cow.

Methane has a global warming potential (GWP) of about 28 times that of CO₂ over 100 years. So, 1 kg of methane is equivalent to 28 kg of CO₂ in terms of warming effect.

95.8 kg of methane × 28 = 2,682 kg of CO₂ equivalent per year per cow.

2,682 kg CO₂e/year × 1 billion cows = 2.68 billion metric tons of CO₂ equivalent annually.

It's not - in New Zealand 35% of GHG emissions are from cattle, with over 53% from agriculture in general.

Source: https://environment.govt.nz/publications/new-zealands-greenh...

The parent did not say anything about climate and pointed to actual the problem in The Netherlands: nitrogen deposition. Our nature parks are dying because there is far too much nitrogen deposition from nearby farms.

(But our current right-wing populist government likes to pretend the problem does not exist, so they have to be slapped on the wrists by courts and the EU.)

I would gently encourage you to engage with the topic rather than a puerile dismissal as “farting cows”. Agriculture is one of the main drivers of climate change (~30%), and and also has associated land usage implications. Ruminants (“farting cows”) directly produce around 6% of our total emissions.

Do the math. Then comment.

Farting maybe, but the impact from cow burps is measurable and no conspiracy theory.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17517715/