… hectares of Dutch farmland have dropped out of the field register since 2009
Every year, Dutch farmers declare their fields to the government for subsidies. Those declarations form the BRP, the national register of agricultural parcels. Stack eighteen editions of it on a 2-metre grid and you can see, for every patch of land, the last year it was farmed. Where that year is before 2026, the land has left the register: built over, turned into nature, or no longer declared.
- Hectares gone, 2009–2025
- …
- Of all land farmed in that time
- Hectares lost per year, on average
- …
- Hectares still farmed in 2026
- …
Year by year
Each bar is the land whose last year as a declared field was that year. The colours are the ones on the map. Two bars need care. The 2009 bar holds land that was a field in 2009 and never again, but loss before 2009 is not in this data at all. And … hectares were declared in 2025 but are missing from the 2026 edition, which is still a concept: some of it may return when the final edition comes out.
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What the land became
The national land use map LGN2025 records what covers every 5 × 5 m of the Netherlands today. Laid over the land that left the register, it shows what took the place of farming: … hectares are now buildings, greenhouses or building sites, … roads and rail, … solar parks and … forest or nature. More common still is grass that is no longer farmed, in and around towns (… hectares), and … hectares still look like farmland: no longer declared, or not changed yet.
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Year by year
Of the land that left the register up to 2020, about one hectare in eight is now built on. For recent years that share falls to a few percent: building takes time. Recent losses are mostly still farmland according to LGN. Partly nothing has happened there yet, and partly LGN2025 itself uses the 2025 field register, so land last declared in 2025 shows as farmland almost by definition.
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LGN2025 by Wageningen Environmental Research (CC BY 4.0), built from the BRP of May 2025, BAG buildings (February 2026), TOP10NL (November 2025) and satellite images of summer 2025. "Forest and nature" includes grassland under nature management (LGN class 45); building sites are in LGN class 27, other rural land use. Narrow strips along field edges take the class of the road or ditch next to them, which adds a little to roads and water.
Where whole areas went
Much of the lost land is scattered: an edge here, a field there. These six areas are different. They are the largest stretches where at least half of every 128 × 128 m cell left the register, the kind of change a new housing estate, business park or nature project leaves behind.
Background maps: PDOK BRT-Achtergrondkaart (CC BY 4.0).
Per municipality
Large rural municipalities lose the most hectares; cities such as Nijmegen, Eindhoven and Rotterdam, and the greenhouse area of Westland, lose the largest share of their farmland. Switch between the two to see both stories.
| # | Municipality | Province | Hectares gone | Share |
|---|
Per province
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Municipal boundaries of 2025 (CBS, via PDOK). … hectares of lost land lie outside any municipality boundary and are left out of this map.
What grew there last
The crop declared on the land in its last year, using the HCAT crop classification. Grassland dominates, as it does in Dutch farming overall. In the early editions not every Dutch crop code has an HCAT match; … of the lost land has no mapped crop.
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About the data
- Source
- The BRP (Basisregistratie Gewaspercelen) by RVO, published through PDOK, editions 2009 to 2026, as harmonized in the Fields of the World catalog (CC0).
- The raster
- One Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF of 314 MB in RD New (EPSG:28992) with 2 m pixels. A pixel holds the last edition in which a field covered its centre, as year − 2000; 0 means never. This page reads it with HTTP range requests: only the tiles you look at are downloaded. See its README and AGENTS.md.
- What "gone" means
- Last declared in 2025 or earlier, so not in the 2026 edition. Leaving the register is not the same as being built over: the land may have become nature, a garden or a horse paddock, or may simply no longer be declared. Small shifts of field boundaries between editions also add thin strips along field edges to the total.
- Caveats
- The 2026 edition is still a concept. Loss before 2009 is invisible. Hotspots, municipalities and crops are all counted on the same 2 m grid, so their totals add up to the national figure.
- Built with
- OpenLayers, Chart.js and GDAL. Statistics computed on …; code on GitHub.