How many Canadians are aware of the massive protests taking place around the world today? Or if you are aware of the protests, do you know what’s at the root of the upheaval? No matter how much faith you have in our legacy media you will have to admit even if you agree with the way they present information, they do seem to completely leave out some really important issues altogether.
Granted, there’s so much going on the shear amount of upheaval taking place around the globe is certainly hard to keep up with. This simple meme adapted from a photo of the leaders of the G8 taken just a couple of weeks ago shows that British leader Boris Johnson and Italian leader Mario Draghi are already gone and asks “Who is next?”
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Considering the war in Ukraine, the fall of Boris Johnson, and our own inflation maybe it’s no surprise we find little ‘mainstream’ information out there about the farmer protests. But these are far too important for us to ignore. At least two nations are undergoing demonstrations that make Canada’s Freedom Convoy appear quaint in comparison. In the Netherlands, tens of thousands of farmers have been protesting, sometimes violently for months now. In Sri Lanka discontent has been ramping up since the springtime. While issues as diverse as inflation and the war in Ukraine are sited as causes, the root of the unrest in both countries comes down to the way their governments are treating farmers.
In the short videos and articles shared below, we set out to give you a much better understanding of what is happening, and most importantly, why.
“Zijn er ook boeren?” shouted Mick Jagger, in Dutch, into the microphone at a Rolling Stones concert in the Netherlands last week. “Are there any farmers in the house?”
Dutch farmers make for an unlikely cause célèbre. For starters, most are conservative, not liberal. And they are fighting against stricter environmental regulations, not for them.
Yet they are winning over liberal-minded people like me who sympathize with the family farmers who provide us with our daily bread and yet receive so little respect from society’s ruling elites.
And now they’re inspiring protests by other farmers across Europe, including in Germany, Poland and Italy. Along with the protests that brought down the government of Sri Lanka, they constitute a growing global revolt against green elites.
I have praised the current Dutch government for being sensible on matters like climate change. Last year it embraced nuclear energy, one of the first Western nations to do so since the 2011 Fukushima accident spooked the world.
But the government’s poor treatment of its farmers has shocked me. The prime minister recently called the protesting farmers “a – – holes,” and sniffed, “It is not acceptable to create dangerous situations.” And yet it was a Dutch police officer, not a farmer, who inexplicably fired on a 16-year-old boy driving a tractor. Luckily, he wasn’t injured.
While nitrogen pollution worsens climate change, the government says its main motivation for reducing it is about protecting its nature areas. Scientists say that in 118 of 162 of the Netherlands’ nature preserves nitrogen deposits are 50% higher than they should be.
Without a doubt the Dutch should do more to protect their nature areas. The country produces four times more nitrogen pollution than the European average, due to its intensive animal agriculture.
The Netherlands is the largest exporter of meat in Europe and the second largest exporter of food overall after the United States, a remarkable feat for a nation half the size of Indiana. Food exports generate more than $100 billion a year in revenue. Experts attribute the nation’s success to its farmers’ embrace of technological innovation.
But even many on the political left say the government demands are too extreme, based on radical green fantasies and dodgy science. “It seems to be very fast,” saidWim de Vries, a professor at Wageningen University and Research who 10 years ago made alarmist claims about “planetary boundaries.”
What, exactly, is going on?
Michael Shellenberger is the author of “Apocalypse Never” and a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment.”
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The situation in Sri Lanka is even more volatile where food shortages are already affecting 1 in 5 people and threatening the majority of the remaining population. The situation this week turned extremely dangerous as massive crowds forced the President to resign. More on that below.
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COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s Agriculture Minister Mahinda Amaraweera on Saturday was jeered by a group of farmers who protested his visit to an agriculture-related programme in Tissamaharama, a town situated in the country’s southern province in Hambantota district, forcing him to flee the premises.
Amaraweera visited the Tissamaharama Divisional Secretariat on Saturday to attend an agriculture-related programme.
Upon his arrival, a group of angry locals, consisting mostly of farmers, gathered opposite the local government body and staged a protest, according to web portal newsfirst.lk.
When the minister attempted to inquire, chaos broke out forcing the minister to flee the premises, the report added.
Sri Lanka’s economic meltdown has taken a severe toll on the agricultural sector.
A blanket ban on the use of chemical fertilisers imposed by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in April 2021 has caused a crippling blow to rice production in the country.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has predicted that by September this year, around four to five million out of the country’s 22 million population could be directly affected by food shortage.
In such a grim scenario, farmers across the island nation have been forced to abandon their fields.
Earlier this week, the Cabinet also approved a move to grant government officials one leave per week for the next three months to engage in agriculture to mitigate the approaching food crisis.
The Sri Lanka Army will also take part in a farming drive aimed at cultivating over 1,500 acres of barren or abandoned state land to multiply food production and avert any shortage in the future, newsfirst.lk reported.
Sri Lanka which is facing its worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1948.
The economic crisis has led to an acute shortage of essential items like food, medicine, cooking gas, fuel and toilet paper, with Sri Lankans being forced to wait in lines for hours outside stores to buy fuel and cooking gas.
The nearly bankrupt country, with an acute foreign currency crisis that resulted in foreign debt default, announced in April that it is suspending nearly USD 7 billion foreign debt repayment due for this year out of about USD 25 billion due through 2026.
Sri Lanka’s total foreign debt stands at USD 51 billion.
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This week massive crowds stormed the Presidential Secretariat and then the Presidential House resulting in the President leaving the country and stepping down.
In the global rush to decarbonize, agriculture faces a contradictory narrative: livestock emissions are condemned as climate threats, while the same crops turned into biofuels are praised as green solutions argues senior fellow Dr. Joseph Fournier. This double standard ignores the natural carbon cycle and the fossil-fuel foundations of modern farming, penalizing food producers while rewarding biofuel makers through skewed carbon accounting and misguided policy incentives.
In the rush to decarbonize our world, agriculture finds itself caught in a bizarre contradiction.
Policymakers and environmental advocates decry methane and carbon dioxide emissions from livestock digestion, respiration and manure decay, labelling them urgent climate threats. Yet they celebrate the same corn and canola crops when diverted to ethanol and biodiesel as heroic offsets against fossil fuels.
Biofuels are good, but food is bad.
This double standard isn’t just inconsistent—it backfires. It ignores the full life cycle of the agricultural sector’s methane and carbon dioxide emissions and the historical reality that modern farming’s productivity owes its existence to hydrocarbons. It’s time to confront these hypocrisies head-on, or we risk chasing illusory credits while penalizing the very system that feeds us.
Let’s take Canada as an example.
It’s estimated that our agriculture sector emits 69 megatonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) annually, or 10 per cent of national totals. Around 35 Mt comes from livestock digestion and respiration, including methane produced during digestion and carbon dioxide released through breathing. Manure composting adds another 12 Mt through methane and nitrous oxide.
Even crop residue decomposition is counted in emissions estimates.
Animal digestion and respiration, including burping and flatulence, and the composting of their waste are treated as industrial-scale pollutants.
These aren’t fossil emissions—they’re part of the natural carbon cycle, where last year’s stover or straw returns to the atmosphere after feeding soil life. Yet under United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines adopted by Canada, they’re lumped into “agricultural sources,” making farmers look like climate offenders for doing their job.
Ironically, only 21 per cent—about 14 Mt—of the sector’s emissions come from actual fossil fuel use on the farm.
This inconsistency becomes even more apparent in the case of biofuels.
Feed the corn to cows, and its digestive gases count as a planetary liability. Turn it into ethanol, and suddenly it’s an offset.
Canada’s Clean Fuel Regulations (CFR) mandate a 15 per cent CO2e intensity drop by 2030 using biofuels. In this program, biofuel producers earn offset credits per litre, which become a major part of their revenue, alongside fuel sales.
Critics argue the CFR is essentially a second carbon tax, expected to add up to 17 cents per litre at the pump by 2030, with no consumer rebate this time.
But here’s the rub: crop residue emits carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide whether the grain goes to fuel or food.
Diverting crops to biofuels doesn’t erase these emissions: it just shifts the accounting, rewarding biofuel producers with credits while farmers and ranchers take the emissions hit.
These aren’t theoretical concerns: they’re baked into policy.
If ethanol and biodiesel truly offset emissions, why penalize the same crops when used to feed livestock?
And why penalize farmers for crop residue decomposition while ignoring the emissions from rotting leaves, trees and grass in nature?
This contradiction stems from flawed assumptions and bad math.
Fossil fuels are often blamed, while the agricultural sector’s natural carbon loop is treated like a threat. Policy seems more interested in pinning blame than in understanding how food systems actually work.
This disconnect isn’t new—it’s embedded in the history of agriculture.
Since the Industrial Revolution, mechanization and hydrocarbons have driven abundance. The seed drill and reaper slashed labour needs. Tractors replaced horses, boosting output and reducing the workforce.
Yields exploded with synthetic fertilizers produced from methane and other hydrocarbons.
For every farm worker replaced, a barrel of oil stepped in.
A single modern tractor holds the energy equivalent of 50 to 100 barrels of oil, powering ploughing, planting and harvesting that once relied on sweat and oxen.
We’ve traded human labour for hydrocarbons, feeding billions in the process.
Biofuel offsets claim to reduce this dependence. But by subsidizing crop diversion, they deepen it; more corn for ethanol means more diesel for tractors.
It’s a policy trap: vilify farmers to fund green incentives, all while ignoring the fact that oil props up the table we eat from.
Policymakers must scrap the double standards, adopt full-cycle biogenic accounting, and invest in truly regenerative technologies or lift the emissions burden off farmers entirely.
Dr. Joseph Fournier is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An accomplished scientist and former energy executive, he holds graduate training in chemical physics and has written more than 100 articles on energy, environment and climate science.
In a pivotal shift, Denmark’s Veterinary and Food Administration has issued new guidance: Farmers can immediately suspend Bovaer administration if they “suspect” it poses risks to herd health. On the heels of the Danish announcement—the major UK trial of Bovaer on 30 Arla Foods farms has abruptly ended amid health fears.
On November 5, 2025, Denmark’s Fødevarestyrelsen (Danish Veterinary and Food Administration) issued a press release and accompanying guidance clarified that farmers (specifically the herd manager, or besætningsansvarlige) could immediately exempt individual cows or entire herds from the mandatory Bovaer use if they suspected it was causing or exacerbating health issues, prioritizing animal welfare under existing regulations.
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This was in response to surging reports of cow illnesses since October 1, where farms with over 50 cows have been mandated to use the synthetic additive, Bovaer (containing 3-nitrooxypropanol), developed by DSM-Firmenich. If the farms do not comply, they face heavy fines.
Bovaer Backlash: Danish Cows Collapsing Under Mandatory Methane-Reducing Additive |
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The guidance emphasized that exemptions apply to cases of feed-related metabolic disorders (e.g., fatty liver, milk fever, or rumen issues) and require documentation via a “tro- og loveerklæring” (declaration of good faith) on LandbrugsInfo, with veterinary consultation recommended for severe cases. No fines would apply for such welfare-based pauses, though farmers must still meet methane reduction goals via alternatives like increased feed fat. This effectively gave the “green light” for opting out on welfare grounds.
Reports surged of Danish dairy farmers unilaterally halting Bovaer administration, accusing the government of “poisoning” livestock to meet climate targets.
A November 3, 2025, article in LandbrugsAvisen (Denmark’s leading agricultural newspaper), quoted veterinarian Torben Bennedsgaard from BoviCura (a specialized cattle health advisory service closely tied to Danish dairy producers). He stated: “Every other farmer has problems with Bovaer.”
A spokesperson for DSM-Firmenich, the company that developed Bovaer, told Agriland, that “animal welfare is our highest priority”. They went on to state: “We are actively engaging with the relevant organisations to ensure that all these concerns are fully investigated and properly addressed..In previously reported cases, Bovaer was not identified as a contributing factor to the health concerns raised…Bovaer is a proven, effective and safe solution that has been successfully used for over three years by thousands of farmers in over 25 countries.”
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On 7 November, the BBC reported that the major UK trial of Bovaer on 30 Arla Foods farms concluded earlier than planned amid “farmer health concerns” for cows, echoing Danish reports. It stated: ‘Bovaer is now the focus of an investigation in Denmark after farmers raised fresh concerns but manufacturer DSM-Firmenich said the additive was “proven, effective and safe.”’
Arla, which supplies major retailers like Tesco and Aldi, is now reviewing data before deciding on wider rollout. The trial aimed to cut methane by 30% but faced criticism for lacking transparency on animal impact.
Jannik Elmegaard, of the Danish Food and Veterinary Administration, told the BBC: “They very aware that some herd owners have reported animals showing signs of illness after being fed with Bovaer” but it was “unclear how many cows were affected”.
Last year, I reported on the UK’s Arla trial—whilst digging through various safety assessment reports on Bovaer, I came across several troubling findings and anomalies.
BREAKING: Methane-Reducing Feed Additive Trialled in Arla Dairy Farms |
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| On November 26th, Arla Foods Ltd. announced via social media their collaboration with major UK supermarkets like Tesco, Aldi, and Morrisons to trial Bovaer, a feed additive, aiming to reduce methane … | ||||||
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In a public rebuttal, Frank Mitloehner, Professor of Animal Science at UC Davis and Director of the Clarify Center for Enteric Fermentation Research, posted on X ”Hogwash!”—dismissing viral claims of Bovaer-related cow health issues in Denmark by highlighting his lab’s ongoing research and widespread U.S. usage data.
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The green light in Denmark is not a mere victory—it’s a damning admission that the emperor’s new feed has holes big enough for a whole herd to escape through.
As Arla licks its wounds and DSM-Firmenich doubles down on “proven safe,” the real trial begins: can climate crusaders stomach the science when it bites back?
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