Amid the welter of government-backed agri-food industry plans based around the continued expansion of food exports, there remains a deafening silence around the crunch issue of Ireland’s national food security.
In contrast, in the UK there is growing alarm that, as geopolitical tensions escalate, climate-fuelled extreme weather events intensify and global supply chains fray, its population is likely facing into soaring food prices and outright shortages in the near term.
The UK’s Climate Change Committee recently urged the government there to ensure at least 60 per cent of its total food needs are produced locally. Ireland, remarkably, appears to have no targets whatever for domestic food production.
Despite Ireland having four times more farmland per person than the UK, we are far more food-insecure than our nearest neighbour.
RM Block
We import more than 80 per cent of our food for human consumption as well as millions of tonnes of grains and feedstuff for livestock.
In 2024, Ireland imported about 400,000 tonnes of potatoes, apples, onions, carrots, cabbage and tomatoes – all crops that grow well in Irish conditions. Horticulture uses less than 2 per cent of Ireland’s farmland, yet produces three times the income per hectare of conventional agriculture. It is also labour-intensive, accounting for one in 10 agri-food jobs in Ireland and producing more than half a billion euros in farmgate value.
Yet it receives little more than lip-service from either the State or farming organisations. Domestic production of fruit and vegetables has been in free fall for decades, with an 85 per cent decline in field growers of vegetables since 2000.
The contrast between Ireland and the Netherlands could hardly be more stark. Despite having a land mass less than half our size, with a population of 17 million, the Netherlands is the world’s second largest food exporter, with its remarkable horticulture sector employing more than 140,000 people – similar to Ireland’s entire farming population.
Exports of Dutch horticultural products were valued at €38 billion in 2025 – double Ireland’s entire food and drink export industry.
The key to its success is technology and expertise. Land is scarce in the Netherlands and so is highly valued. Its vast complex of greenhouses covers about 100sq km. These extend the growing season to almost the entire year, despite the Netherlands having a similar climate to Ireland. Growing under glass typically leads to more than ten times greater productivity per hectare farmed.
I recently visited the Voorhof nursery in Overijssel, a greenhouse complex covering 7.8 hectares that specialises in cucumber production. Manager René Kalter said their annual production was bout 16 million cucumbers, weighing 8,000 tonnes. More than 60 people are employed at the facility, which operates for about 10 months of the year and exports to several European countries.
It has a reserve of five million litres of rainwater recovered from the rooftops stored for use and 2,800 solar panels for electricity production.
A key vulnerability of greenhouses is that they are energy-intensive. Typically, Dutch greenhouses are heated with gas, which, apart from carbon emissions, makes them vulnerable to price shocks, such as the wars in Ukraine and Iran.
The Voorhof nursery is one of a cluster of five horticulture businesses all within a close radius. In 2012, they jointly invested €10 million in a geothermal system, one of about 30 similar systems around the Netherlands. This draws a steady stream of hot water from 2,000m underground to the surface, and this is distributed to the nurseries via a network of insulated underground pipes.
The Voorhof nursery has a giant buffer tank that holds about four million litres of geothermally heated water that meets virtually the entire heating needs of the plant.
Pest management is a big challenge for all monoculture food systems. Traditionally, Dutch horticulture has been a big user of chemical pesticides, but there has been a sharp shift towards biological pest control. This includes introducing predators, such as parasitic wasps, mites, beetles, nematodes and ladybirds to consume aphids and other pests, as well as using sticky traps.
Hygiene is paramount. Before entering the greenhouse complex, we had to wash our hands with disinfectant and put plastic covers on our shoes. Packs of biological agents were visible throughout the greenhouse, including pheromones designed to confuse insects with chemical signals to prevent them from mating.
The Voorhof nursery has not fully eliminated chemical pesticides, but, according to Kalter, they are “the last line of defence, and only called upon rarely”. Avoiding pesticide usage is also an important consideration in protecting the health of employees.
While the investment and expertise required for high-tech horticulture are significant, so too are the rewards. A 2019 study on horticulture options for Ireland commissioned by the Department of Agriculture noted that Dutch glasshouse-based vegetable production was about 80 times more profitable per hectare than dairying, as well as being vastly more efficient at producing food.
The Netherlands is among the world’s largest exporters of agricultural and food technology, including cell-cultured meat, vertical farming and innovations that enable farmers to cut water consumption, pesticide use and carbon emissions. Incredibly, the Netherlands accounts for a third of all the global trade in vegetable seeds.
At the epicentre of the Dutch agriculture miracle is Wageningen University and Research (WUR), an agri-food research facility surrounded by a cluster of research centres collectively known as Food Valley – a nod to California’s Silicon Valley cluster of tech enterprises.
Dutch agri-food expertise and training is exported to 100 countries, many in Africa and Latin America suffering from food insecurity. This includes modified seeds and plants that are better able to cope with climate-related stresses such as drought, flooding and extreme temperatures.
On a recent visit to WUR, Rick van de Zedde, programme manager of the eco-phenotyping facility, took us into a light- and temperature-controlled room where wheat plants on 300 glass plates were being exposed to differing growing conditions and stresses. Their root systems are scanned optically using a robotic system every day to precisely measure the responses of different genotypes to, for instance, drought.
In a greenhouse, tomato plants were being encouraged to produce more vitamin C by tweaking the frequency of LED light the plants are exposed to at different parts of their life cycle. Researcher Rick Wieggers showed us a processing facility where freshwater algae are being used as a novel source of sustainable lipid and protein production to replace petroleum and palm oils in food and transport. Microalgae produce vastly more lipids per hectare than standard oilseed crops and WUR is working to scale this process up to make it viable at an industrial level.
The Achilles’ heel of the Dutch food system remains its huge export-oriented intensive livestock sector which, like Ireland’s, is heavily reliant on cheap imported animal feeds and is a big source of emissions and water pollution.
That’s the view of Bart de Steenhuijsen Piters, senior food systems researcher at WUR. “Efficiency and resilience are in conflict with one another, and through the development of the European food system, including in Ireland, we have been optimising efficiency, while not being aware that we have managed resilience out of the system”.
With multiple shocks hitting the global food system in the last few years, including Covid and two big wars, all amplified by worsening climate impacts, de Steenhuijsen Piters warns of growing near-term threats to European food security, a vulnerability he argues is greatly increased by excessive livestock agriculture.
High volumes of meat production and consumption are “neither sustainable nor particularly healthy”, he says.
For a glimpse into a truly sustainable model, de Steenhuijsen Piters points to neighbouring Denmark, which recently abolished its ministry for agriculture and – unlike Ireland – is cracking down hard on nitrogen pollution in a public backlash against its ultra-intensive pig production industry in particular.
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While Irish politicians repeat the hollow mantra about Ireland “feeding the world”, the Dutch system, for all its flaws, is doing exactly this. If Irish agriculture wants to look at a model for the future that uses high technology to combine productivity with resilience and efficiency in the face of our fast-changing climate, then the Netherlands has much to teach us.
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John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and author of The Lie of the Land – The Truth About Farming, Climate and Power in Ireland
