Transcript:

Holland is pretty crowded; our land is quite expensive. Labor is expensive, so we have to be as efficient as possible. We have to be more efficient than others to compete. And that competition drives innovation and technology. We decided to go for, not more hectares but for more yield per hectare. And that’s the moment that we start looking into precision farming, precision technology.

A lot of people think its science fiction but it really is not. We have only 14 and a half hectares and we are producing around 100 million tomatoes a year. The idea about this greenhouse is we even use less water we use 50% less energy. Our tomato plants grow in a hydroponic system so we know for sure that everything is clean and we can steer everything very precisely.

We use all the new techniques and all the innovations with the minimum impact on environment. My definition of precision farming is doing the right thing on the right moment on the right place. Of course, we’re more sustainable because we use less input and that’s economically good for me. We use a range of technology we are using soil scans, that measure the soil quality and the availability for nutrients in the soil and then the thermal cameras can detect diseases or water stress.

Implementing precision farming is a way of getting a better yield and a better quality. I still believe that farming is the job of the future. There will be more people more mouths to feed and less area. We have to expand the yields of our food that much that we actually need the precision farming to do that.

Sometimes sustainable solutions are costing a bit more in the short term but in the long term they should be more effective and that’s actually what we are seeing. You need to have the guts to invest in those kinds of things for the long term.

Vocabulary Bank:

competition - noun the act of competing as for profit or a prize; a business relation in which two parties compete to gain customers; an occasion on which a winner is selected from among two or more contestants; the contestant you hope to defeat

innovation - noun the act of starting something for the first time; introducing something new; a creation (a new device or process) resulting from study and experimentation; the creation of something in the mind

hectare - noun (abbreviated `ha') a unit of surface area equal to 100 area (or 10,000 square meters)

precision - noun the quality of being reproducible in amount or performance

technique - noun a practical method or art applied to some particular task; skillfulness in the command of fundamentals deriving from practice and familiarity

impact - noun the striking of one body against another; a forceful consequence; a strong effect; influencing strongly; the violent interaction of individuals or groups entering into combat; verb press or wedge together; pack together; have an effect upon

sustainable - adj. capable of being sustained

nutrient - adj. of or providing nourishment; noun any substance that can be metabolized by an organism to give energy and build tissue

disease - noun an impairment of health or a condition of abnormal functioning

solution - noun the successful action of solving a problem; a method for solving a problem; a statement that solves a problem or explains how to solve the problem; the set of values that give a true statement when substituted into an equation; a homogeneous mixture of two or more substances; frequently (but not necessarily) a liquid solution