High-tech market gardening and organic farming
The Netherlands is one of the world's three largest exporters of agricultural produce. Dairy farming and market gardening are its main agricultural activities. Agriculture employs around 3% of the Dutch workforce and accounts for 2.2% of the country's GDP.

Its productivity has grown enormously in the past few decades. This is largely due to high-quality training, first-class research and an effective system of disseminating practical advice to farmers.

But growth is no longer a priority. The priorities now are the environment, animal welfare and the quality of produce. Eighty per cent of Dutch agricultural exports go to the EU, with Germany the largest market. The Netherlands also imports agricultural commodities, mainly for animal feed and the foodstuffs industry (coffee, tea and cocoa).

Competition in arable farming
Changes in EU agriculture policy are gradually doing away with guaranteed prices for grain, sugar and potato starch. The result is a more competitive market. Arable farming faces major changes. Arable farms will become less uniform. The trend is towards diversity. Some arable farmers are breeding more livestock, and others are concentrating on market gardening. Some are developing sidelines, such as recreation and selling produce directly to the consumer, and others are switching to organic farming.

Natural enemies in market gardening
In recent decades, market gardening has expanded both in output and acreage. Its main products are flowers, vegetables, fruit, mushrooms, trees and bulbs. Greenhouse growers are currently spending large amounts to meet environmental targets agreed on with the government. The objective is to reduce the use of fertiliser and pesticides and hence the production of waste.

Glasshouse growers are also implementing an energy covenant agreed with the government to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and use energy more efficiently. Many market gardeners use natural enemies instead of pesticides to protect their produce against harmful insects and diseases.

Encouraging organic agriculture
Organic farmers make almost no use of chemical pesticides or fertiliser. Their output is relatively small but growing. To boost this trend, the sector is working to improve its business management, sales structure and price competitiveness.

Large food retailers are becoming more interested in organic produce. Albert Heijn, the Netherlands' largest supermarket chain, plans to stop selling food sprayed with pesticides within the next ten years. Thirty per cent of Dutch consumers now regularly buy organic produce.

Livestock farming controversial
The main livestock farming activity is dairy farming. In 1984, the EU introduced limits to dairy production in the form of milk quotas, which encouraged farmers to become more efficient, producing the same amount of milk with fewer cows.

As well as breeding dairy cattle, which graze outdoors, many farmers breed other livestock - especially pigs and poultry - intensively in indoor pens. Most of the pork, poultry meat and eggs thus produced are exported.

The outbreak of avian flu in the poultry sector in 2003, following earlier outbreaks of foot and mouth disease and swine fever, reopened the debate on intensive farming. Discussions were wide-ranging, extending beyond animal diseases and their control to issues such as public health, animal welfare, the environment, land use and trade relations. They also focused on the position of the farmers themselves and future prospects for them and their families.

Fisheries and fish quotas
The two main branches of the Dutch fishing industry are deep-sea and coastal fishing. But fish and shellfish farming and freshwater fishing are also important.

Sea and coastal fishing are done by a modern fleet of cutters and freezer trawlers. Cutters fish for sole, plaice, cod, whiting, herring and shrimp. The largest markets are for flatfish such as sole and plaice. Trawlers fish for herring, mackerel and horse mackerel.

Shellfish farming is also important, mainly taking place in the waters of Zeeland (in the southwest of the Netherlands) and in the Waddenzee (between the Dutch mainland and the West Frisian Islands).

Under EU fishing policy, the quota of fish that each member state may catch is decided annually by the European Commission, acting on the advice of biologists. The objective is to keep the stocks of each species above the safe biological minimum. The past few years have seen an increasing effort to keep fishing sustainable. Excessive catches ("by-catch") can be limited by altering the nets or by driving fish into them with the help of electrical stimuli (thereby causing less disturbance to the sea floor).

Agribusiness
Agribusiness, the whole range of agriculture and related activities, is a very important industrial sector in the Netherlands. It encompasses the production of food, alcohol, tobacco and other non-food agricultural products, along with all the trade and services related to farming.

More than half the produce of Dutch agriculture and market gardening is processed by the food, drink and tobacco industries. The agribusiness activities with the highest turnovers are abattoirs and meat-processing, dairy farming, animal feed production, the tobacco industry and the drinks industry.