Journal · 2026.07 · 12 min

A Century of Dutch Greenhouses — What Taiwan Should Really Learn Isn’t a Glass House

Mention modern greenhouses and many think first of the Netherlands. But what’s truly worth learning isn’t transplanting the Venlo glass house wholesale — it’s how the Dutch built a long-running, continuously improving protected-agriculture system around their own climate, crops, market, and industry. What Taiwan should learn is that problem-first way of thinking.

A country with weak winter sunlight and less land than Taiwan still had about 10,000 hectares of greenhouses as of 2024 — and roughly 94% of that greenhouse crop area had swapped chemical pesticides for biological control. This is the Netherlands. It ranks among the world’s best at flowers, vegetables, seedlings, environmental control, agricultural equipment and international logistics. But its real skill lies behind those numbers.

But in my view, what Taiwan should really learn from the Netherlands is not to lift the Venlo glass house home unchanged — it’s how they developed, around their own climate, crops, market and industrial conditions, a protected-agriculture system that can run for the long term and keep improving.

Looking back over a century of Dutch development, it falls roughly into three phases: early development, rapid post-war growth, and the mature transition after the 1990s.

Early-20th-century Dutch greenhouses were driven mainly by advances in glass manufacturing. Structures were relatively simple — timber frames, single- or twin-slope glass roofs — with very limited environmental control. Their purpose wasn’t year-round precision production but extending the season, helping plants overwinter, and blunting the effect of cold on horticultural crops.

This phase solved the most basic question of all: can a facility break through the climate’s original limits?

After the Second World War, Dutch industry, transport, energy and farming organisations recovered fast, and the greenhouse evolved from a mere shelter into an agricultural production factory with equipment, control and standardisation. Its most representative form is the Venlo greenhouse.

The Netherlands’ biggest winter constraint is insufficient light, so the Venlo design focuses on raising transmission, minimising frame shading, and using a standardised column grid and components to expand growing area and suit mechanised work. In other words, the Venlo succeeded not because it “looks high-end,” but because it genuinely answered the local priorities: weak winter light, land-use efficiency, and production at scale.

Heating, CO₂ dosing, fertigation, rockwool cultivation, movable thermal screens, roof ventilation, grading, and packing logistics were then integrated one after another. The greenhouse stopped being a frame plus glass and became a complete production system spanning propagation, cultivation, climate control, harvest and dispatch.

After the 1990s the Dutch greenhouse industry matured, and the emphasis shifted from building more houses to raising output per unit area, cutting energy use, recycling water and nutrients, and reducing chemical crop-protection inputs. Current Dutch research points further toward non-fossil energy, closed water loops, material circularity, resilient cultivation, and autonomous control.

This shows that a mature greenhouse industry doesn’t just keep piling on equipment — it starts to calculate:

• How much water, power, fertiliser and labour does each kilogram of crop consume?
• Does the equipment investment show up in yield, quality and price?
• When a system fails, can the site repair it quickly?
• Can production data accumulate and become the management basis for the next crop?

Reminder one: a greenhouse must have a local climate logic. The Netherlands solves winter cold and weak light; Taiwan faces summer heat and humidity, typhoons, short-duration heavy rain, pests and disease, and coastal salt damage and corrosion. The problems are simply not the same.

A house that rightly stresses light capture and heat retention in the Netherlands can become a summer heat trap in Taiwan. Glass or rigid panels raise transmission but can also raise the heat load; the finer the insect-net mesh, the higher the ventilation resistance usually is. Council of Agriculture material likewise notes that in Taiwan’s hot, humid subtropics, greenhouse planning must pay special attention to ventilation, shading, and cooling methods such as fan-and-pad and misting.

So a greenhouse in Taiwan can’t only ask “which type to build” — it must first be clear on:

• What is the crop? Where is the site? Will you produce through summer?
• What is the surrounding wind field? Is drainage adequate?
• Are water quality and power stable? How will equipment be stowed and shut down when a typhoon comes?

Until these are settled, even the prettiest greenhouse catalogue is only a reference.

Reminder two: structural safety isn’t about steel tonnage. During its rapid growth the Netherlands also suffered storm-driven greenhouse collapses from inconsistent structural design, and only afterward built up design and construction standards. The current NEN-EN 13031-1:2020 brings the strength, stability, serviceability, durability and foundations of commercial greenhouses into the design requirements.

Taiwan too has Council-of-Agriculture standard greenhouse drawings — dome, gable, Venlo and single-slope back types among them. But standard drawings can’t be applied to every site as-is: on coasts, open farmland, slopes, high-wind zones, unusual terrain or differing geology, you must re-check basic wind speed, ground conditions, foundations, drainage, member connections, covering fixings and the load of attached equipment.

In particular, typhoon damage in Taiwan usually doesn’t start at the main columns — it progresses from roof vents, roll-up sides, doors, covering, film-clamping systems, gutters, or local joints failing one by one.

Reminder three: smart agriculture isn’t about installing the most sensors. Temperature, humidity, light, wind speed, rainfall, soil moisture, pH and EC can all be monitored — but what really matters is whether that data turns into control logic:

• Under what conditions do the roof vents or roll-up sides open?
• Does the shade screen retract automatically in strong wind?
• How do fans and the pad wall avoid driving humidity too high together?
• When the network drops or a sensor fails, can equipment be operated manually?
• When a motor, controller or film-roller breaks, are spare parts available in Taiwan?

Without operating procedures, maintenance staff and a spare-parts system, even the most advanced climate-control system can lose its function within a few years.

Reminder four: confirm the crop and the market before deciding the greenhouse grade. Another reason for Dutch success is a complete system of production, grading, auction, logistics, branding and export. When planning a greenhouse in Taiwan, you can’t look only at cost per ping from an engineering angle — you have to return to the farm business:

• What is the crop’s unit price and the market’s capacity?
• Are the estimated yield and cull rate realistic?
• Can summer or typhoon-season production create a price advantage?
• Are harvest, grading, packing and cold chain already arranged?
• What are the annual power, consumables, labour and maintenance costs?
• Can the extra output from the equipment cover depreciation and operating costs?

More equipment doesn’t mean better returns. For many Taiwanese farms, getting natural ventilation, rain protection, insect exclusion, wind resistance, drainage and irrigation right first is often more practical than importing a high-energy, fully climate-controlled system from day one.

Reminder five: real industry upgrading needs long-term knowledge accumulation. Behind the Dutch greenhouse industry, farmers, research institutes, schools, equipment makers, engineering firms, cooperatives and market channels all work together. Research reaches trial sites quickly and flows back to growers; the problems growers hit become, in turn, new subjects for research and equipment improvement.

It isn’t that Taiwan lacks technology — it’s that design, construction, cultivation, equipment, maintenance and marketing often each go their own way. After handover there’s no operating data; when equipment fails the original maker can’t be found; growing results never feed back into the next house. If every greenhouse starts from zero, real industry competitiveness is hard to build.

The value of Dutch greenhouses lies not in glass roofs, computer control or any one equipment brand, but in a century spent integrating climate, crops, structure, equipment, energy, knowledge and market into one system. What Taiwan should really learn is that problem-first capability. We don’t need the greenhouse that most resembles the Netherlands — we need the one best suited to Taiwan’s site, crop, budget and operating capacity.

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