Dutch language

How to pronounce dark-green in Dutch?

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This is a story about the Netherlands as you seldom see it.
This is our country seen from the sky.
If you really want to know what our daily lives look like...
sometimes chaotic, sometimes very organized...
then take a look from a spectacular new perspective.
In this episode: The patchwork of the Netherlands.
How did all those dykes, ditches, and polders form our land?
And how did the land form us?
Sixteen million people on a little piece of ground...
as seen from the sky.
This is the Netherlands from Above!
The Netherlands.
Designed according to tight...
endlessly repetitive lines and patterns.
The road junction at Ridderkerk.
Heerhugowaard.
Town of the sun.
In this country we are always at work.
There is construction, planting, breaking, uprooting...
replanted, moved, widened, fenced, widened...
deepened, bent and straightened again.
New terps at the Overdiepse Polder.
There is no country in the world...
where every square meter has been dug up as often as ours.
Every place was conceived by someone.
Naarden Vesting.
In this episode: The patchwork of the Netherlands.
Do we form the land or does the land form us?
These are 80,000 farming businesses.
Literally forming the contours of the land.
The Noordoostpolder and the rest of Flevoland.
Everything in perfectly straight rows.
Yellow dots are pig farmers...
who have built on poor, sandy ground: the yellow areas.
Green is clay-rich grounds.
Here cows graze on the juicy grass.
The red is rich peat soil.
Zegveld.
A thousand years ago...
farmers began poldering the peat swamps.
With a pattern of ditches. And a cow here and there.
The country is so swampy...
that they have bred special cows with broader hooves.
With the polders our love of patchwork was born.
The land reclamation went so well...
we used this everywhere.
The Beemster, a tight, geometrical allotment...
on which the street pattern of Manhattan is based.
The masterpiece of Lely.
Flevoland.
And Boskoop.
It became wealthy with conifers, lilacs, forsythias, shrubs...
hortensias and hedge plants.
Farmers and horticulturists on a large scale, and small too.
The digging and burrowing is in our genes.
With spring's first rays of sunshine...
everything will again be beautifully raked, potted and replanted.
All the patchwork and so on, that is mine.
This is his little workshop.
Everything he has made and is still making...Here he can mess around.
Yes. That's how it works.
This summer he made a beautiful barrier here.
I am very proud of it.
On the shed are two iron flower boxes.
Those were once coat racks.
A man has to do something. Don't need him doing housework.
You keep going. -We planted this tree first.
It was a small cedar. About 50-60 cms.
Been here for 20 years. Sometimes it loses a branch.
It's still my first favorite.
We are happy. Content.
Happy and content.
What more does one want?
Than to make something nice in this bit of Rotterdam.
We did it together.
We want to make something nice.
You can have a villa and a nice house.
And be swimming in money.
But if you aren't happy, then you are poor.
A boat is nice too. Then you both must love it.
A garden is nice, if you both love it.
If you don't have that, you can forget it.
Here we have everything we want. Freedom. That's it.
We both love it.
The Netherlands has always had a lack of space.
This made us creative.
An urge for ways to use rich soil...
or poor soil with few options.
Flevoland.
Thought up in its entirety on the drawing board.
This is the 'shape-ability' of our country.
The story is of course that the polders...
were an expansion of our country...
were unprecedented.
Not only in agriculture, but for many uses.
A planned landscape, created on the drawing board.
It shows the fact that we can shape and form...
our country.
Finished? Are we done draining?
Well, is the Netherlands finished? Not quite.
Because we have a complex system of pumps, ditches...
you name it.
We live in a prosthesis...
which allows us to live below sea level...
to work and do agriculture and more.
That prosthesis always needs maintenance. Always building and growing.
We've accepted our fight against the water so much...
we are the only country with taxes that...
pay for the water pumps: water board tax.
We don't need higher dykes...
as long as we put an old fix in a new coat.
8 new terps in the Overdiepse polder on the Bergsche Maas.
This is not a model-building club.
Here in Brabant they are drilling.
When will it be in position?
And on the highest level.
Nice weather.
It is always exciting, eh? -Yes.
But it all begins on the ground.
Five meters per second.
A good farmer sees whether his ground needs fertilizer.
But where exactly...
that remains unseen to the naked eye.
You must look at this. There you can barely see it.
There is a solution for it.
This plane has an infrared camera...
so it can see what our eyes cannot.
I will unhook the electricity.
Change the batteries for the next flight.
Then the same field looks very different.
Red areas are not fertilized.
On dark-green spots...
the ground has many nutrients and less in the yellow areas.
If the images from the plane are good...
then I can see three weeks earlier...
where to fertilize.
No need to fertilizer everything now.
The computer ensures that every spot...
gets the exact right amount of fertilizer.
Precision agriculture is good...
as it matches the right spot and time...
for an optimal yield.
Land is very expensive in the Netherlands.
We try to use all areas...
to optimize the yield.
Only one spot in the Netherlands...
with no patchwork.
Here nature has beaten our instincts.
The Oostvaardersplassen.
The Oostvaardersplassen were planned to be an industrial area.
We were too 'cheapish' to pump it out.
Since we only needed it in 30 years time.
This did not go well.
Nature came crashing in here.
At the time, things were going bad for Mother Nature.
She was nearly pronounced dead.
Here you could see that given the right possibilities...
what Dutch nature can still do in the Netherlands.
Did the Netherlands look like that? Or could it in the future?
Then everything would need to go wrong in the Netherlands, Roel.
What this does look like very much are the original bowl swamps in the river area.
We call these primal swamps.
We have, of course, rather...
forgotten about them.
Hundreds of konik horses, Heck cattle and red deer.
We are even making a patchwork for the wild animals here.
Building an eco bypass near Hoog Buurlo.
Each spring, the water comes to life.
For many species of fish it's time to go upstream...
to feed and reproduce.
But then they hit many obstacles.
Nearly 18,000 locks, dams and pumps.
Here too they have found a solution: fish stairs.
Created to bridge varying heights.
But do the fish really use them?
Here we see a nice, big pike.
He was waiting here, hidden between branches in the water...
to move further.
This is one of the species...
for which the fish stairs were built.
Nice, big pike.
It's summer. The females have mated.
These look for food in the summer, and then in the fall...
go back using the fish stairs.
And here a very nice big bass.
Don't see them often. Usually only small ones.
A nice, high back. A large dorsal fin.
And this is the small mud crawler. A tiny fish.
Lives, as the name says, in the mud. On the water's bottom.
He has a brother, the big mud crawler.
A protected species often mentioned when it comes to creating fish passageways stairs.
Here you can see, on that side, the water in the stream.
The fish want to go there, but can't make it up stream.
They search for an alternate route. And that's the fish passageway.
The high-speed flow rate is in between the partitions.
They dash through.
Then they can rest in the chambers.
The larger fish can go right through.
So they can pass all the obstacles.
What once was bent, has now been straightened.
And what once was straight between the dotted lines...
has now been bent.
In order to develop and re-develop our country...
we must know how our country looks now...
Down to each exact millimeter.
We can chart all this from the sky.
All year round planes fly in straight lines over the Netherlands.
Each square centimeter is meticulously measured and noted.
This map helps measure bottom subsidence.
Photos are taken...
to record changes.
Oddly, we don't do that ourselves.
We let our southern neighbors do this.
They know our country the best.
We are now at the drowned land of Saeftinghe.
We are at 2000 feet...
and 200 knots.
A mere 400 kilometers per hour.
On board a gyroscope stabilized camera...
which takes photos every few hundred meters.
There are 8 lenses which take photos.
Both in color and infrared.
That sensor is built on a mount.
That is stabilized.
The photo is always taken straight down.
Here you see photos we are taking now.
In each photo is basically the same as the previous one.
We have an overlap. We make a puzzle.
Then we create a large image.
This is such a photo.
That is the center of Breda.
The Koepel prison is visible here.
We can zoom in.
We can see people in the prison playing soccer.
These are multiple pictures, all laid next to one another.
All Breda's center.
Those separate pictures...
I will put together.
And then it's one whole picture.
That is visible here.
Yes, I have seen all of the Netherlands.
Every tiny bit.
The structure in it surprises me.
The tight lines and the nucleus of villages.
It's all here... more tightly ordered than in Belgium.
I prefer Belgium.
It is more fun in Belgium.
Because it's messier.
Each change is visible from the air.
Cities make clever use of this info.
To see whether we are obeying the rules....
and aren't building a shed without permission.
Because our country may never...
become messy like Belgium.
And there are many rules for this.
Civil Code, Article 5.
1. Not permitted within the distance stated in clause 2, are...
...trees, shrubs and hedges...
...is understood in this and the following title: every stone...
wood or other suitable substance...
100 years ago new districts were built quickly...
to give workers decent housing.
To prevent a messy situation a close eye was kept out to ensure...
that residents kept their gardens tidy.
In the Rotterdam neighborhood of Vreewijk there are still today...
monitors out on the streets checking on the state of affairs.
The hedge looks inviting. -Right. Number 54.
We must go around to the back, right?
Hey, neighbor. Come here.
And if I'm correct, we can go inside here.
Then we can see how it looks from the inside.
Too bad they didn't clean up.
Then we go to number 52.
This is a surprise behind the door.
This is enjoyable. Good morning.
It looks great, sir. -My wife does it. Alone? -Yes.
Beautiful garden. Very neat.
What do you think of: an A+ for all three? -Agreed.
Good morning. -Good morning.
The inspection team. -Good morning.
It looks top-notch. -Thank you. Thanks you. -Yes.
Do you like Grandma's garden? -Yes. -Yes.
This is just a disaster. This is a disaster.
This is terrible. That people do this to fellow residents.
All those weeds will go to the neighbors.
And they have a nice garden.
That is unnecessary, isn't it?
You don't need a beautiful garden.
As long as it is just tidy and clean.
Here. This one. Yes.
This has a grade 7. That means it is a neglected garden.
That will be reported to the housing foundation.
We are the eyes of Vreewijk.
Of course, we see everything. We can enter every garden.
But we inspect all the districts in principle...
We get into all the gardens.
You get an oversight of how things are here.
All that tinkering on our country...
is impossible without strict rules and controls.
Whether it is gardens.
Or new land.
Or existing land.
It keeps us busy.
Our land is never finished.
But that is also our strength, in our country and far beyond.
We have made this country.
But the country has also made us.
It has formed us.