Wageningen UR: Research with a mission

With the GreenTech coming up in June we're getting in touch with several horticultural know-it-alls, entrepreneurs, innovators and general greenhouse geeks. Today we present you Sjaak Bakker. The Wageningen UR doctor has expertise in designing and developing energy conservative greenhouses and greenhouse environment—crop response interactions. At present, he is manager of the newly formed Business Unit Wageningen UR Greenhouse Horticulture. 

The Greenhouse Unit of Wageningen University and Research has the mission: “Research for an international sustainable greenhouse horticulture”. We focus our research on protected horticulture production systems around the world from low tech greenhouses to indoor farming, and to a lesser extent, on the preceding (breeding / young plants) and subsequent links (post-harvest automation) in the production chain. Recently we included the flower bulb research as well within our research programs. Projects aim to improve sustainability, resource efficiency, robotics and market oriented production of high value horticultural crops. We partner with (inter)national and local governments, consortia of horticultural entrepreneurs, the supply industry and service providers active in the greenhouse sector. In the international market the main projects are related to the design, set-up and operational support of research organizations and implementation of modern techniques and adaptive greenhouse designs related to e.g. water use efficiency and production improvement.

It will differ for different regions in the world. In the Netherlands the actual topic given the recent decisions by our government will almost for sure be: independence of natural gas as energy source. Generally and more on the overall world scale I should say: providing the world’s population with a healthy diet based on sustainable produced products, here water seems to be the crucial factor and more important than energy in terms of availability, quality and efficiency.

We will be present on our well-known booth as one of the main knowledge organizations to maintain our national and international contacts. During the knowledge session program recent research results on topics like energy saving, new crops, water efficiency, integrated pest management and Robotics will be presented. The activities on Agro Food Robotics of Wageningen University and Research will also be shown on a separate booth.

I am proud of almost all of the projects we are involved in currently. But on national level I am very glad with the projects supported by the members of our business club (Club of 100) on technology topics like detection, indoor farming and phenotyping. Internationally, we support the research on efficient water use in greenhouses within the “Estidamah” research and demonstration center in Saudi Arabia. A nice example of Dutch cooperation as our original design was built by a Dutch greenhouse construction company and equipped with state of the art Dutch technology. Finally I would like to mention a project which catches attention these days: the international challenge we organize on Autonomous Greenhouses supported by Tencent. This project aims at controlling greenhouse vegetable production by artificial intelligence. In this challenge several multidisciplinary teams will grow cucumbers in our greenhouses in Bleiswijk remotely.

Protected horticulture is and will remain the ultimate example of sustainable intensification of plant production and the leading sector with respect to resource efficiency and especially related to water use efficiency. It will not only contribute to the efficient production of high value crops itself but also generate spin-off solutions for sustainable and safe open field agro and horticultural production systems. In this sense it will remain the leading and trend setting sector for the entire (plant) production sectors and generating high quality jobs in the entire chain from breeding, production, supply, logistics, retail and services.