The only way to stop farmers committing fraud by dumping more manure on their land than allowed is to reduce the number of cows, pigs and chickens on Dutch farms, according to the public prosecutor in charge of environmental crime.

Rob de Rijck told the NRC in an interview that little has improved in the approach towards fraud with manure since the NRC uncovered major problems in Brabant and Limburg in 2017.

Plans to set up a nationwide task force have not materialised and both the public prosecution department and product safety authority do not have enough capacity to carry out proper checks, De Rijck said.

‘More manure is being produced than the land can cope with,’ he said. ‘From a criminal law perspective, the only thing that can be done is to reduce the amount of manure. We should have less livestock.’

The Netherlands is currently allowed to spread more manure on farmland than in other EU countries but that could change next year when the EU reconsiders the rules.

Forgery

The NRC found last year that farmers are forging their accounts, illegally trading their manure or dumping more on their land than permitted by law, while transport companies are fiddling lorry weights and making unrecorded trips to dump manure at night.

Brabant and Limburg are home to 60% of all pigs, 40% of all chickens and one sixth of all cows in the country which together produce 16.5 billion kilos of manure.

Factory farms are subject to strict rules about how much manure they can put on their land. The rest has to be disposed off or traded with other farmers who have not used up their own manure quotas.

But disposal costs money and some farmers are unwilling to spend the cash. Instead, they falsify their own manure records, in some cases, by doctoring manure samples to alter the concentration of phosphates and nitrates, the paper said.