Trucks show up at Han Langeler’s dairy farm in the Netherlands each spring and haul some of the cow manure up to 150 kilometres away.

There, it is spread on fields in an area with fewer livestock farms than Langeler’s area near Aalten, near the German border. Langeler then buys nitrogen fertilizer to top up the manure he was allowed to spread.

Trucking manure is part of the strange nitrogen mathematics used in Europe as it attempts to balance nutrient use and penalizes manure based only on its nitrogen effect, without considering other nutrients, soil organic matter and biological benefits.

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