The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant by showing what the future of farming could look like.
To a townie, some of it seems extraordinarily simple: a hectare of irrigated ryegrass, for example, needs around a quarter of a tonne of nitrogen fertiliser every year, while lucerne needs none. There’s a growing pool of livestock genetics on tap to breed animals, especially cows, that pro...
At first I was focusing on crops in Belgium, which is where I live, although of course many of these crops are also grown in other areas of western Europe and indeed other parts of the world. But so popular has this post become that I have extended it to crops grown elsewhere in the...
It is well established,that different crops need rather different quantities of water to pro-duce a yield.Rice,e.g.is a very water intensive crop,using twice as much water per hectare as wheat(FAO 200 1).When farmers decide to switch from rice cultivation to any so called upland crop,thi...