Shadowing Practice: How One Tiny Country Rivals American Farming - Learn English Speaking with Video
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The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, despite being only a little bigger than the state of Maryland.
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How does a country this size even come close to the U .S., the world's top exporter?
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By devoting more than half of its land to farming, and focusing on high -value goods like eggs,
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meat, cheese, tomatoes, and peppers.
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We are sweet and tiny.
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It's in our genes, you know, it's our DNA.
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In 2024 alone, the Dutch farmed goods worth over $140 billion.
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The country pioneered greenhouse growing and now uses robots and algorithms that predict yield, optimize water use, and can even tell when a tomato is ripe.
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But its position at the top is being threatened.
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Soaring energy prices, labor shortages, and new rules limiting pollution or squeezing the industry.
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So how did the Dutch become a global agricultural powerhouse?
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And more importantly, what can its model teach the rest of the world about how to grow more with less?
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In the 13th century, nearly a fifth of what is now the Netherlands was underwater.
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So the Dutch built dikes to hold back the sea and pioneered the use of windmills to pump out the leftover water.
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Over centuries, a complex system of pumps kept low -lying land dry.
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And from this reclaimed land, small family farms fed the country.
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But that all changed during
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World War II, when Nazi Germany took over.
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In 1944, Dutch rail workers went on strike, protesting the occupation.
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In response, the Nazis cut off food supplies.
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Over five months, 20 ,000 people died from starvation.
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It became known as the winter of hunger.
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After the war, food security became a national priority.
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Under the new agricultural minister, Siko Mansholt, the government industrialized farming.
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He subsidized important agricultural products and merged farms into bigger, more efficient ones.
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Public investment in research and education transformed Wageningen University into the country's secret weapon.
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Its research has been used in over 150 countries.
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Over the years, it has spun off dozens of startups.
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This one gathers electricity from living plants, and this one builds robotic harvesters.
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You can find
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Dutch -inspired greenhouses covering thousands of acres in Spain, Canada, and China.
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It all started in Westland, an area just outside of Rotterdam, with one of the world's largest concentrations of greenhouses.
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After dark, they light up the horizon in orange, purple, and green hues from the powerful lamps used to speed up plant growth.
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Some people say it will never be really dark in Westland.
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Here, Marguerite Looye runs a third -generation tomato farm called Looye Kukers.
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How did your grandfather grow vegetables?
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I'm guessing it didn't look like this.
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No, no, not at all.
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It was completely different than in these days.
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In these greenhouses, plants can grow a foot a week.
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Marguerite's team prunes, wraps, and lowers each one by hand.
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If you didn't control the vines...
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Oh, yeah, then you will get the jungle.
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The Netherlands exports more than 900 ,000 tons of tomatoes a year,
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despite having a climate that's naturally too cold and rainy for these warm weather fruits.
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While high -tech solutions help them grow faster and year -round, they still need bees to pollinate every plant.
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You cannot do it without them.
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So they are probably one of the most important tools that we have in our glass house.
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When they're not pollinating, they live in these bee hotels.
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In each box are around 800 bumblebees.
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You can hear them making more noise.
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Now they are still cool.
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Overhead, LED lights mimic the sun and create optimal summer conditions year -round.
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Developed by scientists at Wacheningen, these lights run more efficiently than older sodium bulbs.
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With the same electricity, you can get almost double light.
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Watering these plants has also become more efficient.
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Over the last two decades, greenhouses have reduced their water usage by as much as 90%.
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The water will fall here and it will go back at the end of the row
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and then it will go into a drain, silo.
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We will clean this water and we will reuse it.
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That means it takes just four liters of water to grow a kilo of Dutch tomatoes, compared to the global average of more than 200 liters.
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While tech has optimized much of the growing process, humans still pick tomatoes better than robots, which struggle to see the fruit through these dense vines.
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It's ready to be harvested when the last tomato, this one, is completely red.
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For example, these two are just perfect.
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These are ready to be harvested because that's the moment when they have the best taste.
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Workers follow this chart to harvest tomatoes at peak flavor.
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This is green, so it's color number three, so not ready.
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This, oh, then this is quite red, but it's still not red enough.
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It's color number eight, so this one will be harvested with the second round this week.
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Because Loya only picks ripe fruit, it has a small window to get it into cold storage before it spoils.
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Today the tomatoes came, we packed them in the night shift and tomorrow morning everything goes away with the trucks.
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So to help speed up production, this tomato camera.
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He's looking for damage, split.
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The machine takes two pictures, one from the top and one from the bottom.
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This one we see there he had found one split. Must be somewhere.
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Workers still check the bigger tomatoes by hand.
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We are checking for the size.
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It must be between 47 and 62 millimeters.
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If you see like this, here you missed one tomato.
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It's not so nice.
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And when you look like this, and then we say this is nice but this too are too small.
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Robots do a lot around here.
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This machine on the main factory floor helps sort out tomatoes that are too small or too yellow for the premium brand.
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The green one we throw away because it costs too much time and it's older tomatoes, the taste is not so well.
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Machines also sort the reddest and sweetest tomatoes one last time.
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Then workers package them by hand at these stations so they're ready to ship out.
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But tomato greenhouses aren't the only ones relying on lots of tech.
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Just a few miles away,
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Arnaud de Van Dijk runs one of the largest pepper operations in the country. to keep them healthy.
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So it asks every day a lot of attention to the nature.
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Nature is a very complex thing.
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Every year, Wiedi Holland grows 85 million peppers.
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Like tomatoes, these peppers are grown hydroponically, meaning not in the ground.
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And here too, computers monitor and adjust everything from temperature and watering schedules to lighting.
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These yellow cards track pests, like white flies or thrips.
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The insects are tracking to the color of the green.
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They are being taken by the color of the green.
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And soon cameras will be able to read the sticky cards themselves.
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We are going to a situation where we can monitor which insects are in the store.
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And the sooner we detect a plague, the better and easier we can keep these biologists under control.
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Together these innovations have allowed
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Dutch growers to achieve yields 12 times higher than the average pepper farm globally. Since 2007,
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the company has also used automated carts guided by wires in
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the floor to move harvested peppers from the greenhouse to the processing hall.
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On the packaging floor, AI -powered cameras take pictures of each pepper, comparing the images to a database of ideal fruit.
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That information is used to sort the peppers by size, weight, shape, and color.
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Ones with small imperfections don't go to waste.
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The company sells them to salad producers and other food processors.
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The ones that do pass the camera stage go on to packaging.
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This machine drops nearly 400 pounds of perfect peppers into each crate.
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More and more automatic palletizing and self -driving forklifts are replacing humans in this factory.
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The Netherlands is facing a growing labor crisis, with two -thirds of businesses struggling to find workers.
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VD Hollen introduced all this new technology to automate as much of the packaging process as possible.
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As much as 95 % of Wiede Holland's bell peppers are exported, and about 60 % of all crops produced in the Netherlands leave the country.
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Its position on the North Sea makes it easy to ship from giant ports in Rotterdam and Amsterdam.
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Germany is the top buyer, but Dutch produce also reaches the UK, China, and the US.
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Producing and packing all of this food requires a lot of energy.
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Greenhouses across the Netherlands use nearly 107 petajoules, enough to power more than 2 million homes a year.
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And not everyone's happy about this.
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Some studies estimate that a greenhouse -grown tomato could have six times the carbon footprint of a field -grown one.
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But that largely depends on the energy source used to grow them.
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That's why Dutch growers are trying to change how their farms are powered.
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Until recently, much of their energy came from Russian gas.
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But the war in Ukraine forced the Netherlands to cut off imports.
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Energy prices soared as a result, forcing many greenhouses to look for alternatives.
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Loja already had its own power plant on site.
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Heat from the energy producing process actually warms the greenhouse, and any extra energy is sold back to the power grid.
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Vidi Hollen, meanwhile, turned to a different source.
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50 % of the warmte -behoefte is not made as a earth -warmte.
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The company invested $46 million, along with a few other growers, to drill for the renewable energy source.
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We have our gas -use use, and we have been in the warmte.
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I'm proud of that.
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Wageningen University is working with growers to reduce their energy consumption.
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Leo Marcellus is largely credited for the widespread use of LED lights in Dutch greenhouses.
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Without light, there is no plant growth.
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Custom LED light recipes have helped farmers grow strawberries, cucumber and asparagus faster.
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His research on these lights got glasshouses in the country to cut their power usage by nearly half.
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And now Leo and his team are seeing if they can take it further.
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The question is, can we make as efficient use of the LED lighting as possible?
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Now he's studying how LED light color, intensity and timing can influence growth and lower energy bills.
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And here we are doing an experimental setup where we are growing lettuce with different light.
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In this lettuce trial, his team figured out that by increasing the light intensity in the final week before harvest,
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they can raise vitamin C and sugar content and extend shelf life.
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What gives a good growth?
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What gives a good taste?
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What gives a good nutritional value?
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But also, what is most sustainable in terms of less use of energy?
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And usually that can be a balancing act.
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In another room, his team is working with the Singapore Food Agency on bok choy.
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Here I can choose any condition.
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If I give them low light and a low temperature, they will grow slowly.
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By adjusting temperature, CO2 and light, they can speed up plant growth.
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Many of these testing rooms are pink because red LED lights are better for growing plants.
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Red LEDs are the most efficient in converting electricity into light.
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So a high fraction of red is normally, I would say, advisable.
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But it has to be the perfect balance of red, blue and white light.
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For example, this bok choy likes a little more white light.
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If it is only red, most plants don't like that.
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Leo's colleague Elena Vincenzi is studying how barely visible red light affects a tomato's plant's ability to convert light into energy.
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Here you can see that there is a chamber
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that can be clipped on a leaf and then because the chamber is transparent,
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the leaf can still receive the light that we give to our normal treatments
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and we are able through the machine to actually see what is the rate of photosynthesis.
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If the photosynthesis rate is higher, then perhaps the plant with the same amount of light can grow more and faster.
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She's also trying to reduce water use.
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Swapping in different kinds of growing bases for tomatoes can help with that.
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They're also studying how more robots can help reduce labor costs.
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Several things are studied.
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One of them is about robotic harvesting of the plants.
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There's a lot of interest, of course, in replacing the manual labor by robots.
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Much of what's discovered at Wagening ends up back on farms like Loja and Wiede -Holland.
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Growers often also partly fund the research that we're doing here.
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This tight feedback loop between scientists and farmers may be the secret to what makes
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Dutch agriculture so efficient.
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It dates back to the post -war era, when the Dutch government encouraged researchers and farmers to work together.
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When I was a kid, my father, every Monday or Tuesday evening, I think, he had a study club.
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And then they were with a few growers and they visited their greenhouses.
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I think things like that were very, very positive for the development of our industry.
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Now Wageningen's research is pushing innovation beyond growing plants.
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The Netherlands is Europe's top exporter of meat, raising 4 million cows, 13 million pigs and 104 million chickens every year.
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All that livestock, especially cows for beef and dairy, comes with a high environmental cost.
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And it's not just carbon emissions.
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The bigger issue here is ammonia, a nitrogen -rich gas released from fertilizers, manure and urine.
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In 2017, the Netherlands emitted more ammonia per hectare than any other European country.
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Why?
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Because it has the highest livestock density on the continent.
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Environmentalists say this type of pollution is stressing the native ecosystem.
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Excess nitrogen means tall, fast -growing grasses overtake more delicate native species.
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And it causes algae blooms in waterways.
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To cut emissions, the Dutch government started buying out high -emitting farms
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but calls to limit these emissions have triggered mass protests across the country.
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One place trying to find a solution is Wageningen's dairy campus.
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This is not a commercial dairy farm.
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It's a research center.
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Campus manager Kies de Koning and his team are focused on reducing nitrogen emissions from cows, starting from the ground up.
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They're testing floors that separate pee from poop, since mixing these two releases more ammonia.
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We can run trials where we separate the urine and the solids.
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The separated waste is stored in tanks under the barn to prevent emissions from escaping.
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They've also experimented with robot cleaners, but each one costs nearly $30 ,000.
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A steep price for most farms, which would need at least two.
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The more accessible solution?
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Changing the cows' diets.
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So, can we feed cows in such a way that we have less ammonia emission or less nitrogen losses?
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They're testing different feed combinations with the help of AI -powered troughs,
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which track how much each cow eats and how much methane and ammonia it produces.
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They've already found that replacing fermented grass with maize or fresh grass helps cut methane emissions.
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And when they lower protein and nitrogen levels in the feed itself, the cows will release less ammonia.
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Researchers are also using AI to track cows' health.
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The technology can spot issues like foot rot and identify low emission cows for breeding.
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The Netherlands turned its flood -prone country into an agricultural powerhouse and exported that knowledge around the world.
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But does Dutch innovation hold the secret to feeding the globe?
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The fact is that there is almost a billion people on the planet that go hungry every day.
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Jonas Jägermeier is a climate scientist and crop modeler at Columbia University.
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He points out that half of the calories humans eat come from crops that are grown outdoors.
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Grains like wheat, rice and corn.
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But we're not going to grow staple crops or calorie providing grain crops in a greenhouse environment anytime soon.
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Simply because of financial requirements.
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To reproduce an equal number in harvest, in caloric production, say in a desert environment,
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coupled with a desalination plant that is using renewable energy, that is a sci -fi scenario that is promising,
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but we're not quite there yet.
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So to replicate those millions and millions of hectares of cornfields somewhere indoor is simply not feasible.
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The farms of the future will have to rely on more than just tech.
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They'll need water, seeds, energy, local knowledge, and adaptable systems.
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There is no silver bullet.
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Any implementation strategy that would help change how farmers do practice, how food is processed and transported,
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and how food is then brought to the consumer needs to be in a locally tailored strategy.
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Jonas is now building AI tools that can give farmers early warnings of seasonal forecasts, fine -tune water use, and more importantly,
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connect growers across continents, allowing them to share insights in real time.
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Maybe the real
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Dutch export isn't tomatoes, beef, or robot harvesters.
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It's a mindset, one that values collaboration over competition and policies that drive efficiency.
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The Dutch can't feed the world alone.
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but they've forever changed the way it feeds itself.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “How One Tiny Country Rivals American Farming”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Dutch, greenhouse, plant, energy, tomatoes. This video has 233 sentences and 2861 words to shadow. The speech runs for 19:45. The speaker talks at a steady 145 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 77% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| tomato noun | /təˈmeɪ.toʊ/ | A widely cultivated plant, Solanum lycopersicum, having edible fruit. |
| greenhouse noun | /ˈɡɹːnˌ(h)aʊs/ | A building used to grow plants, particularly one with large glass windows or plastic sheeting to trap heat from sunlight even in intemperate seasons or… |
| pepper noun | /ˈpɛp.ə/ | A plant of the family Piperaceae. |
| cow noun | /kaʊ/ | An adult female of the species Bos taurus, especially one that has calved. |
| emission noun | /ɪˈmɪʃ.ən/ | Something which is emitted or sent out; issue. |
| robot noun | /ˈɹoʊ.bɑt/ | An intelligent mechanical being designed to look like a human or other creature, and usually made from metal. |
| harvest noun | /ˈhɑɹ.vəst/ | The process of gathering the ripened crop; harvesting. |
| efficient adjective | /ɪˈfɪʃənt/ | Making good, thorough, or careful use of resources; not consuming extra. Especially, making good use of time or energy. |
| crop noun | /kɹɑp/ | A plant, grown for it, or its fruits or seeds, to be harvested as food, livestock fodder, or fuel or for any other economic purpose. |
| farmer noun | /ˈfɑɹ.mɚ/ | A person who works the land and/or who keeps livestock; anyone engaged in agriculture on a farm. |
| nitrogen noun | /ˈnaɪ.tɹə.d͡ʒən/ | The chemical element (symbol N) with an atomic number of 7 and atomic weight of 14.0067. It is a colorless and odorless gas. |
| package noun | /ˈpæk.ɪd͡ʒ/ | Something which is packed, a parcel, a box, an envelope. |
| export noun | /ˈɛks.pɔɹt/ | Something that is exported. |
| electricity noun | /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/ | Originally, a property of amber and certain other nonconducting substances to attract lightweight material when rubbed, or the cause of this property; now… |
| dairy noun | /ˈdɛə.ɹi/ | (also dairy products or dairy produce) Products produced from milk. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| speed up verb | /spiːdˈʌp/ | To accelerate; to increase speed. |
| cut off verb | /ˌkʌt ˈɔf/ [ˌkɐɾ ˈɔf] | To remove by cutting. |
| buy out verb | to purchase the entire stock or extent of something | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| hold back verb | To act with reserve; to contain one's full measure or power. | |
| light up verb | To illuminate, to bring light to something, to brighten. | |
| point out verb | To identify among a group of similar subjects, or in a scene where the subject might not be readily seen or noticed, with a gesture of the body. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- How did your grandfather grow vegetables?
- I'm guessing it didn't look like this.
- If you didn't control the vines...
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · has spun · has also become |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being threatened · has been used · be harvested |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 21 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, they've, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: methane /ˈmiːθeɪn/, grandfather /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌfɑðɚ/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, photosynthesis /ˌfoʊ.toʊˈsɪn.θə.sɪs/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: emission /ɪˈmɪʃ.ən/, efficient /ɪˈfɪʃənt/, innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, pollution /pəˈluʃən/, efficiency /ɪˈfɪʃ.ən.si/
- Long words — get the stress right: electricity /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/, innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, intensity /ɪnˈtɛnsɪti/, importantly /ɪmˈpɔɹ.tənt.li/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like tomato, greenhouse, pepper.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.