Dutch ombudsman says government was unreliable toward farmers for a decade

Ten years of uncertainty

The National Ombudsman, Reinier van Zutphen, will present a report on Wednesday, 4 November, in the afternoon in Garnwerd, Groningen, on how the government has dealt with farmers over the past ten years. The report, titled 'Een boer met kiespijn lacht niet' (roughly 'A farmer with toothache does not laugh'), draws on conversations with 32 farmers from across the country, held since 2019. Van Zutphen began the research after noticing during his two-yearly provincial tour how hard farmers were struggling with changing policy. He also spoke with farm organisations, Natuurmonumenten, scientists and experts, including people from Rabobank, in talks held between November 2025 and May 2026. He concludes that the government was unreliable, took too little leadership, was not transparent enough and listened too little to farmers. He sums up the effect on farmers in one line.

“Farmers have suffered from the government's actions and from uncertainty about the future.”

Clashing rules and permits

Rules on nitrogen, manure, nature, water and animal welfare change often and do not always fit together. The report calls the result 'administrative spaghetti' when European, national, provincial and municipal rules all land on one farm. Authorities sometimes contradict each other, and in one case a farmer was ordered to demolish a barn under a cessation scheme but was refused a demolition permit after a protected bird species was found. A poultry farmer classed as a peak-load emitter within 25 kilometres of a nature area cannot expand, and a new barn is not allowed, while he sees cheap meat from poorly treated chickens from Brazil entering the market under the new Mercosur agreement. In Brabant, five poultry farmers were told their nitrogen permits would be withdrawn entirely, including one who had proposed air scrubbers for one of his four barns seven months earlier. According to the ombudsman, this uncertainty stalls investment and makes succession doubtful.

Farmers' experiences

A dairy farmer asked the province in 2015 whether expanding his cattle barn needed a nature permit and was told that a PAS notification would suffice. In May 2019 the Council of State struck down how permits were granted, and around 1,800 others in a similar situation lost the certainty they had relied on. A pig farmer took a second full-time job to pay for a low-emission barn, but according to the report the barn does not meet the latest environmental requirements. One farmer saw an investment in a biological air scrubber come to nothing because the province left that system off its list of permitted systems. A dairy farmer was allowed to spread far less manure on land bought for 100,000 euros, and a goat-farming couple nearly split up because of how the government acted. Family life is under strain too, because different visions on continuing, stopping or adapting can put relationships under pressure.

Timing and the road to the report

The chart below sets the report against the earlier steps: a 2015 permit question, the May 2019 Council of State ruling and talks that ran from November 2025 to May 2026.

The cabinet presented its nitrogen plans on Tuesday, 3 November, one day before the report is presented. Several farmers told the ombudsman that important decisions were often announced on Fridays or just before holidays, when officials could not be reached. They suspect the timing is deliberate, in the hope that anger fades by the time officials return.

What comes next

Van Zutphen says a new agriculture policy alone will not restore trust, and that restoring it means the government must acknowledge what went wrong. He sums up the problem in these words:

“The government must start taking farmers seriously. Recent years of fickleness have fueled distrust.”

He adds that changing laws and rules will not stop, because social goals, court rulings and European rules make some changes necessary. The cabinet's plans ask tens of thousands of farmers to cut their nitrogen emissions sharply. Minister Jaimi van Essen has said he intends to set out more concretely what the plans mean for farmers.