500,000 Dutch dairy cows are staring down death because of the amount of dung they produce

Half a million Dutch dairy cows have a pretty big problem. If the Netherlands can’t find a way to manage the dung they produce, European Union environmental rules mean they will have to be killed. If those cows are culled, it would remove roughly a third of the dairy cows in the Netherlands, which wouldn’t be good news for the dairy sector; the Dutch dairy industry had a production value (pdf) of €7 billion ($7.4 billion) in 2014, the last available year for records. The problem has to do with groundwater. The European Union has set rules on the amount of nitrate from fertilizer that’s allowed to seep into the soil. In 2006 the Dutch government secured an 11-year exemption from those rules. The exemption is set to end Dec. 31, but agricultural groups worry Brussels won’t renew the exemption because of concerns over another chemical: phosphate.