A greenhouse in the Netherlands that grows tomatoes.
Adityaman Singh / Business Insider
The Netherlands has some of the most efficient greenhouses in the world.Dutch company Looye Kwekers has tomato plants that grow a foot a week with limited water.The Netherlands yields 12 times more tomatoes than the average tomato farm globally.
The Netherlands is about the size of the state of Maryland, yet it's the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world by value, behind the US.
It produces everything from eggs and beef to tomatoes and peppers, and in 2024, it farmed goods worth over $140 billion. By comparison, the US's agricultural exports amounted to about $176 billion that year.
Still, it's the Netherlands that leads in intensive greenhouse production and innovative technology that helps crops grow faster and produce higher yields than the global average. That's one of the country's secrets for how it can produce so much with so little space.
In fact, the US and other countries worldwide are developing larger-scale Dutch-style greenhouses in hopes of catching up. Here's an inside look at some of the Netherlands' cutting-edge greenhouses and how they work.
Watch how the Netherlands became the world's second-largest agricultural exporter in the video below. Keep reading for an inside look into its beautiful greenhouses.
The Netherlands has plenty of outdoor farms.
Colorful farm fields in the Netherlands.
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The Netherlands dedicates more than half of its land to farming. While its climate is relatively mild, it can't grow certain crops like tomatoes year-round in outdoor fields. So, it relies on massive greenhouses to grow billions of pounds of the red fruit and other crops year-round.
The country's greenhouses aren't just farms — they're the cutting edge of agriculture.
Fields of greenhouses in the Westland region of the Netherlands.
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The Westland region in the Netherlands has one of the largest concentrations of greenhouses worldwide that are also some of the world's most efficient, using climate control, water recycling, and energy-efficient LED lighting to grow more crops faster than most places on Earth.
At night, LEDs light up the horizon.
LED lights in greenhouses in the Netherlands.
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Overhead, efficient LED lights mimic the sun and help create optimal growing conditions year-round, speeding up plant growth.
These LEDs run on almost half the electricity as a high-pressure sodium lamp.
After dark, the powerful lamps light up the horizon in orange, purple, and green hues.
Farmers have to take scissor lifts to the top of this greenhouse.
A worker lowers the strings for tomato plants.
Adityaman Singh / Business Insider
This greenhouse, belonging to the family-owned Dutch company Looye Kwekers, houses thousands of tomato plants.
The plants grow close to a foot a weekby climbing up strings that hang from the ceilings.
Farmers take scissor lifts to the top each week, lower the strings by a foot, and wrap the tips of the tomato plants around the new string, so they'll keep growing.
The tomatoes are picked by hand.
Stefan Lazar examines tomatoes in a Looye Kwekers greenhouse.
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Computers manage everything from lighting and temperature to watering schedules, but pruning and harvesting are still done by hand.
That's because machines have a hard time seeing the fruit through the plants' thick foliage.
There's growing interest in replacing more manual labor jobs, like harvesting, with robots in order to reduce labor costs.
"You cannot do it without them. So they are probably one of the most important tools that we have in our glasshouse," Stefan Lazar, a cultivation specialist with Looye Kwekers, told Business Insider's Abby Narishkin during a visit to the Netherlands in September 2023.
When they're not pollinating, they live in boxes that Lazar calls "bee hotels." Each bee hotel contains about 800 bumblebees.
After harvest, tomatoes reach a processing plant next to the greenhouse.
Tomatoes are sorted in the processing plant.
Adityaman Singh / Business Insider
Machines sort the reddest and sweetest tomatoes. Then, workers package them by hand.
There's a tight window to either ship them out to stores or get them into cold storage before they go bad.
Because they're picked when they're already ripe, workers have to get them processed, packaged, and into cold store within 24 hours.
Over the last 20 years, greenhouses across the Netherlands have reduced their water usage by as much as 90%.
Looye Kwekers sells tomatoes both large and small.
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It takes 4 liters of water to grow a kilogram of Dutch tomatoes, compared to the global average of more than 200 liters.
Looye Kwekers farmers do this by reusing the water. There's a drain pipe on each aisle that collects the condensed water sweated off plants, it flows to the end of the aisle where it's then collected, sanitized, and reused.
At first glance, this greenhouse resembles the tomato farm, but these plants aren't growing tomatoes; these are red bell pepper plants.
A VD Holland greenhouse in the Netherlands.
Federico Campanale / Business Insider
Like Looye Kwekers, VD Holland grows its pepper plants hydroponically, producing about 85 million peppers annually, said A
Yellow sticky cards hang throughout the red pepper greenhouse.
Arnaud van Dijk inspects sticky traps in his greenhouse.
Federico Campanale / Business Insider
Despite being indoors, pests are still a problem in some of these greenhouses. These sticky yellow cards snag some of the intruders. Van Dijk said the pests are attracted to the yellow color.
Van Dijk is working on training computers to read the cards and identify which pests are on them so that growers can take quick action.
"The sooner we detect a pest, the better and easier we can control it biologically," Van Dijk said. That may include releasing friendly mites that eat the pests.
Automated carts transport freshly-harvested red peppers.
Automated carts in VD Holland greenhouse.
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VD Holland has been using these automated carts since 2007. Like Looye Kwekers, humans harvest the red bell peppers by hand, and then these carts transport them to the processing plant guided by wires in the floor.
Processing plants use AI to help sort the red peppers by shape, size, and weight.
Machines on the right sort the red peppers and then package them on the left.
Federico Campanale / Business Insider
On the packaging floor, AI-powered cameras photograph each pepper and compare it to a database of ideal fruit.
That information is then used to sort the peppers by size, weight, shape, and color. The peppers that pass the camera stage go on to packaging.
The Netherlands' greenhouses use a lot of energy to produce and package all that food.
The Netherlands is looking to other forms of energy for its greenhouses.
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Some studies estimate that a greenhouse-grown tomato could have six times the carbon footprint of a field-grown one.
That's because until recently, some of the energy came from Russian gas, but the war in Ukraine forced the Netherlands to cut off imports. So many greenhouses had to look for alternatives.
VD Holland, for example, turned to geothermal energy, investing $46 million, along with a few other growers, to drill. Van Dijk said it has cut the company's gas consumption in half.
