Last week, the European Commission gave the Dutch government the go-ahead to start buying out farms in order to meet the EU’s climate targets.

Under the European Green Deal of 2020, the EU plans to be climate neutral by 2050. As part of this, under the European Climate Law of 2021, the EU wants to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by a minimum of 55 per cent by 2030.

This has exerted a considerable amount of pressure on the Dutch government in particular. In turn, the government is now exerting pressure on farmers. That’s because Dutch farms have been blamed for the Netherlands’ high levels of greenhouse-gas emissions, especially nitrogen emissions, caused by fertilisers and cattle excrement. And so in 2022, the Dutch government put forward a set of agricultural reforms in order to meet the EU’s targets.