It’s a good thing the National Marine Fisheries Service isn’t in the Netherlands. The way NMFS targets dikes for destruction in the name of nature, 65% of that nation would be underwater.

We’re exaggerating, but not much. NMFS doesn’t like dikes, or tidegates. Some folks in the agency appear to have set a goal of removing them in northwestern Washington. They say they want to “help” salmon, even if it ultimately could destroy nearly 70,000 acres of farmland.

You read that right. When it comes to fish, farmers get thrown overboard. Just ask NMFS.

Let’s back up a few years — 150, to be exact. That’s when the first dikes and tidegates were installed in Skagit County, Wash., about 60 miles north of Seattle. What followed were farms, pastures and dairies.

If you were to ask NMFS, it was a horror show of “development.” The very thought of growing food was completely unacceptable.

What they want isn’t farmland. They want mud, and lot’s of it.

Mud is what you get when mother nature does her thing. Mind you, mud is OK, but you can’t eat it.

The folks at NMFS say the tidegates, and dikes, have to go. Because the old tidegates block fish from swimming upstream at high tide when they are closed, the agency wants them gone.

Never mind that “fish friendly” tidegates have been developed and could be used.

What NMFS and environmental zealots — oops, we may have repeated ourselves — are using is legal muscle to try to get rid of the farmers.

We don’t like this one bit. We support farmers, especially when extremists try to put them out of business in the name of the “environment.” The farmers we know take better care of the environment than any bureaucrat or lawyer ever could.

We see it a lot. Someone decides that not enough fish are swimming in a particular stream or river and they invoke the 50-year-old Endangered Species Act to get more.

Or — and here’s the kicker — there can be plenty of fish and the same species as the natural runs but because they came from a hatchery they don’t count.

This is crazy-making. A chinook salmon is a chinook salmon, whether it comes from a river or hatchery.

Speaking of hatcheries, the state of Washington has revved up its hatcheries to help the orcas that were starving in the Puget Sound area. Orcas like chinook salmon and, without the hatchery chinooks to eat, they were struggling.

Note that they were struggling precisely because of the efforts of environmental purists, who don’t like hatchery fish. That state had reduced chinook production in its hatcheries by half. This is all in a report the state wrote on the fate of the orcas.

It’s doubtful a hungry orca checked the origin of a chinook that it was about to eat.

But we digress. The bottom line is that NMFS and the tribes are willing to flush farms and the people who grow food on them in order to reestablish more mudflats in the Skagit Delta. It’s good for the fish, they say.

One has to wonder what NMFS and the environmental crowd will eat once those farms are gone. Mud?