Interest peaked for the Horticulture Digital Community Meeting last month in Europe. Harrij Schmeitz of Tuinbouw Digitaal indicated that the theme of the meeting, besides Sensoring, should have been ‘A peak at the Neighbors’: getting acquainted with the work in the field of sensoring across the national borders. The meeting was started by Sywert Brongersma of the Holst Centre, the host of this day. The Holst Centre focuses on healthy living and are frontrunners in the hybrid integration of systems. However, this integration can really do a lot more and be better translated to the world of agro food. The possibilities are there, we just need to seize these opportunities, according to Sywert.
Colleague Marcel Zevenbergen responded to this with an interesting overview of the potential of gas and ion sensors in agro food. At present, sensors are being developed that work on the basis of an ethylene measurement, fluid measurement and measurement of CO2 values. The latter, for example, was used during an experiment in the Amsterdam Arena during a concert of pop star Rihanna. Herman School of TNO then went on about the usage of flexible electronics for packaging, in particular the integration of electronic features into flexible carriers such as solar panels, smartphones and clothing. These developments are all taking place at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, thanks to the extremely high patent density, the smartest square kilometer in Europe.
Sensors will soon be 3D printed
Marcel Kraaij of the Philips GrowWise Center, also located at the High Tech Campus, showed what all these sensors can now mean for the fresh produce world in the form of City Farming. According to Marcel, City Farming is a response to global challenges. The benefits are efficient use of space, high quality assurance, optimizing that quality and shorter distances between producer and consumer. Opposing these are still challenges such as water usage and lighting costs. The GrowWise Center develops growth concepts for individual ‘short’ crops such as strawberry, lettuce and different types of herbs. And more and more new crops are added. Hereby is taken into account, for example, the number of hours of light a crop needs, because even in such an environment the plant is not getting light continuously, it must be able to ‘sleep’ as well.
That small are mini ion sensors (key for scale)
From a specific focus on City Farming a switch was made to a sector-wide analysis by Harrij Schmeitz of Tuinbouw Digitaal / Fresh Information Management Center. According to Harrij, they are currently engaged in the redesigning of companies so that, with the aid of robots and sensors, they can change to data-driven cultivation. Also a redesign of logistics is on-going, so that companies like Picnic can order peppers and pots individually instead of full pallets. Also the concept of quality will undergo quite a change: developments such as the SCIO scanner will enable consumers to determine the quality of their products themselves, which means that a continuous high quality will be of even greater importance. Veerle de Graef of Flanders' FOOD took over with an explanation of their I-fast platform, with interesting research on NRI at consumer level.
Source: Tuinbouw Digitaal