It deals easily with other countries and has high-quality and very safe end products,” says Mart Verheijen, managing director at Mertens, which has now fulfilled its former managing director’s dream of becoming one of Europe’s most prominent horticultural product suppliers. “The Netherlands is historically a very strong trading nation. It is now the world’s largest exporter of vegetables. Because of the high cost of land and labor, Mertens and other key actors in the industry focused on horticulture - fruits, vegetables and flowers - rather than grains, which take up more space and yield less profit per square meter.Īs a result of similar developments across the country, total agricultural exports from the Netherlands reached EUR 82.4 billion in 2015, around a fifth of total Dutch exports. In 1953, a local apple farmer called Jan Mertens began selling crop protection to enrich soil and fend off pests, increasing yields and paving the way for the intensive, highly mechanized and largely indoor agriculture in the region today. Impoverished and ravaged after the Second World War, hungry citizens began growing mushrooms in bunkers and trying to coax unproductive fields to yield food. The southern state of Limburg is a case in point. How did this tiny country transform itself from a barren, swampy underdeveloped land into the vegetable garden of the world? That’s quite a feat considering that the top exporter is the US, which boasts a landmass more than 200 times larger. Thanks to intensive, high-tech methods and innovations in biological farming such as packaged bumblebees, the Netherlands has become the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world. An unusual industrial product, certainly, but one that is vital in modern Dutch agriculture.
A closer look inside the chilled shelves reveals it’s coming from boxes of bumblebees.
There’s a strange humming noise in the warehouse fridge at Mertens, a horticultural products distributor in the south of the Netherlands.