Greenhouse growers to democratize Dutch CEA nous

Added on 20 March 2022

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Greenhouse growers to democratize Dutch CEA nous

The Netherlands is one of the smallest, most densely populated, and most urbanized countries on Earth. And yet, despite its dearth of arable land, it is the planet's second-largest exporter of agricultural produce by value - behind only the US.

The Dutch have been able to do this thanks to their early adoption of commercial-scale greenhouses in the 19th century - as well as their continued openness to new forms of farm mechanization and agtech innovation. Today, blessed with well over a hundred years of indoor growing knowhow, they've become experts in controlled environment agriculture (CEA); and as climate change makes the task of feeding the world's growing population ever trickier, sharing that knowhow as far and as wide as possible could be a gamechanger.

That's the idea behind CEA platform Source Ag, which is aiming to turn this human expertise into AI that can be easily deployed by indoor growing operations the world over.

"The Netherlands is deeply experienced in greenhouse ag, which is a proven answer to climate-resilient production of fresh fruits and vegetables," said the Amsterdam-based startup's co-founder and CEO Rien Kamman. "It uses significantly less land, gives around 15-times higher yield, uses 20-times less water, there's no run-off [from agrochemical products], plus it's resistant to heatwaves and other extreme weather events," he told AFN.

While Kamman calls it "the gift the Netherlands can give the world," he acknowledges that it isn't possible to "just copy-paste solutions" from the country and expect them to work elsewhere.

"This has been the core of our philosophy in developing our AI from beginning," he said. "It's all about how transferable we can make our algorithms" - both to other geographies, and to other CEA formats like vertical farms.