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In Belgium you cannot start a farm anymore. EU environmental regulations forbid it. Not sure where our food is going to come from but you cannot start a farm anymore. This is insane. They actually forbid you from producing food!!!
They want to "buy local" and have a "circular economy" but half of the shit you want to make, they forbid you to make them!!!
Untrue, as all exaggerated claims tend to be. It doesn't apply to all of Belgium, it doesn't apply to small-scale or organic farms, and it's mostly about livestock (that F*cks up the environment like pretty much nothing else).
I'll check this — it's the kind of claim where the underlying issue is real but the framing may be off.Let me check the Flemish nitrogen rules specifically, since that's likely the kernel of truth here.The strong version of that claim — that you can't start a farm in Belgium and that EU rules forbid producing food — isn't accurate. But it's a distortion of something real, so it's worth pulling apart.
What's actually going on is a nitrogen permitting problem, concentrated in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking north), not a ban on farming. Flanders and the neighbouring Netherlands are among the most densely populated livestock regions on Earth — Flanders alone has roughly 45 million chickens, 5 million pigs and over a million cattle on a small land area. All those animals produce ammonia, and EU nature-protection law (the Habitats Directive, which requires safeguarding "Natura 2000" protected areas) sets limits on how much nitrogen can be deposited on sensitive habitats.
To comply, Flanders built a permit system based on an "impact score." If a project's nitrogen impact exceeds a threshold, it needs a full assessment; projects below the threshold are exempt — and the threshold is set much lower for livestock farms than for industry. So what's genuinely restricted is permits for high-emission livestock operations near protected nature, especially new or expanding ones. Exceptions are explicitly made for small-scale and organic farms with low nitrogen impact (ammonia emissions below 500 kg per year).
A few things that complicate the "you can't start a farm" framing:
This is a Flanders matter, not all of Belgium. Wallonia and Brussels broadly favour the nature-restoration approach, while Flanders opposes the nitrogen decree — the regions handle it differently.
It targets intensive livestock, not food production broadly. Crop farming, market gardening, and low-impact or organic operations aren't what these rules choke off. The binding constraint is ammonia from concentrated animal agriculture sitting next to protected ecosystems.
The grievance behind the meme is real even if the claim is wrong. Farmers near protected areas have faced genuine permit uncertainty — hundreds of farms saw expiring licences with no legal framework to renew or expand them while the government deadlocked. That fueled the 2024 tractor protests across Europe. So farmers aren't inventing a problem; "you literally cannot start a farm" is just an overstatement of a narrower, real squeeze on livestock permitting.
The "where will our food come from" line is the weakest part. The measures aim at reducing herd sizes and emissions in one of the most intensive livestock zones on the planet, much of whose output is exported, not at preventing food from being grown. You could start a vegetable farm in Belgium tomorrow.
So: not insane, not a food ban, not an EU edict forbidding farms — but a real and contentious fight over whether dense livestock farming can keep expanding next to legally protected nature.
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