Since 2007, Grodan has invited crop consultants, scientists, partners, and other stakeholders from all over the world to meet at the Green Expert Platform. This fruitful platform is a true knowledge exchange forum, where Grodan tests and challenges industries’ believes and opinions. On the 13th of November fifty delegates from all over the world gathered in Delft and Bleiswijk to share and learn.
Andrew Lee, our Technical Services Manager at Grodan, is the founding father of the event. He is very clear on the objectives of the forum: “With this event, I want to bring an element of science back into consultancy. In that way, our crop consultants are up to speed with the latest research and developments in our sector, and can transfer these insights to growers. At the same time, the event is a sounding board for scientists as well.”
Andrew explains the horticultural sector has an important role to play in addressing the current challenges of the global food system. “By 2050, we need to feed 10 billion people with less resources. To tackle this, players in our industry are already looking at lowering the energy footprint of the greenhouse itself, developing closed systems to optimize our water and fertilizer usage, and introducing mechanization and robots into the greenhouse. At the Green Expert Platform, participants could deep-dive into some of these new solutions and innovations,” explains Andrew.
Imaging technology and medicinal crops
During inspiring days, several experts and researchers from Grodan and partners shared their latest insights. For example, Gursel Karacor, Senior Data Scientist at Grodan, discussed the exciting role imaging technology can play in crop registration and optimizing the quality and sustainable production of our vegetables. Representatives from Ridder and Carbon Gold gave a peak into the latest developments in closed system drain water recycling and root zone biology. And Frank Janssen, Sonny Moerenhout, and Marielle Taft from Grodan, together with Filip van Noort, scientist and Crop Specialist at the Wageningen University & Research, discussed the most recent research developments in greenhouse-grown medical crops.
“To me, this edition of the Green Expert Platform truly showed that our industry is addressing our global food system challenges together. This is very encouraging and I am very much looking forward to next year’s edition,” concludes a happy Andrew Lee.
Agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of global freshwater use, and extreme weather events—droughts, floods, and unpredictable rainfall—are putting even greater stress on the systems that feed us. Strengthening water resilience requires not just incremental efficiency gains, but a rethinking of how and where we grow crops.
Against the backdrop of the accelerating market transformation from low-tech to high-tech strawberry production, initial results from an innovative trial demonstrate the excellent compatibility between F1 hybrid strawberry seeds and Grodan stone wool solutions.
In the era of advanced technology and increasing consumer awareness, the modern greenhouse is not just a place of production but a true laboratory of innovation and an ecological bastion of food safety. Growers, who just decades ago focused mainly on efficiency and fighting plant diseases and pests, now face a completely new challenge: how to produce fruits and vegetables without chemical crop protection residues, while meeting the market’s ever-growing expectations?
Besides helping growers to achieve their sustainability goals, efficient water management plays a crucial role in maintaining plant health. Realising or steering towards a certain drain volume or drain percentage per day should not be your goal. Instead, the goal should be optimising your irrigation strategy to provide your crop with precisely the amount of water and nutrients it needs. This will ensure the development of a strong and healthy root system, leading to consistently good plant growth, fruit quality and a higher total production. Grodan’s Andrew Lee explains how.
We are a global leader in the supply of innovative stone wool substrate solutions for the professional horticultural based on Precision Growing principles.
