Dutch people are pretty level-headed. You don’t hear Dutch people say that we are the greatest country on earth, or that we have the best food. But the Dutch sometimes forget to be proud of what they have accomplished. After years of battling the sea, specifically the ‘Zuiderzee’, we had enough and turned this sea into a lake. But maybe the biggest accomplishment of all is that we have created our own land: Flevoland. Since 1950 we have built an entire extra province. After having suffered many food shortages during war periods, Flevoland was constructed to secure food supply. Flevoland turned out to host the most fertile soil of the Netherlands. These days, about four times as much crops are grown per square meter in Flevoland compared to the rest of the Netherlands. A lot of these super-fertile fields are owned by the government, and leased to farmers. In order to ensure that the quality of the soil remains high and to avoid diseases in the ground, a crop rotation plan needs to be followed, see Figure 1. Crop rotation plans are therefore imposed on the farmers by the government.
