Want to add a cow to your Dutch dairy herd? Buy pollution rights worth €9,000. A new pig house? That’s €130 per fattening pig. “It’s a new quota,” said Jaco De Groot, who milks 240 cows in Kamerik. The 32-year-old farmer joined his parents on the farm just in time to grow the herd before the reference date 2 July 2015. Others who expanded after that date have faced drastic cuts as the government scrambles to meet European water quality legislation.

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This time, the quotas are not attached to milk production, but to the amount of phosphate released by the country’s intensive dairy, pig and poultry sectors. The quotas can be bought, sold and leased, like in the good old days. The going rate is €200/kg of phosphate from dairy cows, and rising. “It’s now impossible to start pig or poultry farming in the Netherlands unless you buy out someone who is stopping,” said Jaap Uenk, chair of the manure group at the Dutch contractors’ association CUMELA.

To retain its nitrates derogation, the Netherlands had to commit to a maximum of 172.9m kg of phosphate emissions. With the abolition of milk quotas in 2015, Dutch farmers burst that ceiling and the European Commission forced the country to fall back in line or lose its derogation. This led to a 10% cull of the dairy herd and the introduction of the phosphate quotas last year.

The Government is now buying back quotas to take 1m pigs out of production in the south of the country. This is not seen as a bad thing in the industry. “There are a lot of people who are willing to stop. They are looking for an exit and their farms have no value,” said Roland van Asten, who runs five pig farms in the Netherlands and another five in Germany with his family. “We’ve seen it twice before. Every time, the most efficient farmers stay on and it’s good for the sector,” said Bert Urlings of the meat processor Vion.

The effluent headache of Dutch farmers does not end with quotas. Most pig and poultry farms don’t own land and must find an outlet for their manures. Roland exports it onto his tillage land in Germany, joining many other farmers who sent a total of 2m tonnes of various manures across the German border last year. This, however, is decreasing this year as German legislation becomes stricter.

Most slurry finds takers in the Netherlands’ western and northern tillage regions. “A lot of manure is transported over 150km to 200km,” said Jaap Uenk. Under Dutch legislation, each load must be sampled for nitrogen and phosphate, weighed and tracked by GPS. In addition, tillage farmers charge a gate fee of €3-10/t to accept slurry. The total disposal cost to livestock farmers is between €15/t and €25/t.

In the intensive livestock farming regions of the south and east, legislation now mandates that more than half of manures are processed before export. This has sparked the development of a national treatment industry. Roland is joining with partners in the paper and water treatment industries to invest in a biorefinery capable of separating effluents into water and fertiliser. Hauliers are transforming into slurry traders and over 160 processing plants are now licensed – half of them anaerobic digestors producing biogas. Various technologies are developing to separate water from nutrients, from drying to centrifuging and reverse osmosis. “The challenge is to process the manure more cheaply,” Jaap said, with costs currently ranging between €20/t and €25/t.

Dutch chicken manure pellets are popular in Asia, where they are exported thanks to cheap transport available from cargo ships delivering Asian-made consumer goods to the port of Rotterdam and returning empty. The country even has an incinerator capable of burning 400,000t of manure each year. Ashes are exported to the UK and France for use as fertiliser, at 12%P and 12%K. “Chicken manure is the best manure we have, but we are burning it. It gives you an idea of the problem we have,” Jaap said.