Partners

Kverneland / Kubota – Peter van der Vlugt

High tech field sprayers and fertiliser spreaders are produced and developed at the Kverneland Group Crop Care competence centre in Nieuw-Vennep. Kverneland Group Nieuw-Vennep is the competence centre for the development and production of a complete range of mounted, trailed and self-propelled field sprayers, as well as for pendulum spreaders and disc spreaders. The Crop Care products are developed with high focus on quality and customer comfort.

On the 10th of May 2019 Kubota announced the establishment of Innovation Centers in Japan and Europe for the creation of new business ventures, products, and services in Kubota's fields of business. Per 1st July the Innovation Center Europe (hereinafter ICE) starts its activities and will be based in the Netherlands.

The ICE will be organized as a department of KHE. The ICE will rent a facility very close to the European HQ in Nieuw-Vennep and has planned to have a satellite office at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in due time to cooperate with the Universities and start-up companies. Mr. Peter van der Vlugt is General Manager / Chief Technology Officer of ICE. Peter is coming from Kverneland Mechatronics where he was responsible for identifying and following up on Technology trends in general and the Smart Farming Program management. Next to that he is also involved in International Standards, Ag Industry Working Groups, Patents and international Research and Subsidy projects. Peter is also Chairman of the Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation (AEF). Peter will continue to lead the Smart Farming Program until the end of 2019.

The first priority of the ICE is to create a fruitful innovation process in order to generate new concepts that can provide added value to our existing products and markets. This will be done by researching the technical possibilities, the needs of our customers in the markets as well as valuable input of our internal knowledge.

NL-Embassy Tokyo, LNV in Japan – Denise Lutz, LNV in Netherlands – Freek Vossenaar

Denise Lutz is agricultural counsellor at the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Tokyo since summer 2021. Her working area is Japan and her team aims to promote the trade of agricultural products, technology and exchange of knowledge. Freek Vossenaar is Special Envoy at Ministry of Agriculture, Nature & Food Quality, earlier he he represented Dutch agricultural interest at the embassy in Tokyo. Japan is an important partner for the Netherlands. High food prices and a strong focus on quality makes the Japanese market attractive. Japanese agriculture however struggles with ageing farmers, small scale farms, and environmental challenges. Japan is the world's third-largest economy globally. The agricultural sector hardly contributes to that. The farms are small, the average farmer is older than 68 years. A lot of the food is imported. The Abe-government wants to transform change that, it even wants to export food in the long term. A major transition of the agricultural sector is in preparation, the transition from small-scale rice cultivation to knowledge-intensive, high-productive agriculture and horticulture is imminent. Dutch technology agribusiness can make an important contribution. The Netherlands is seen by Japan as innovative, a pioneer in the world in the field of food production. An agricultural dialogue between LVN and MAFF was started in 2016. Within this project the NL-embassy will play a pivotal role in linking Dutch partners to the Japanese market. Our mission is to facilitate the international policy objectives of the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality in the field of agriculture and to contribute to the internationalization activities of the Ministry. Role in this PPP is on promoting and supporting scientific cooperation and knowledge transfer in the fields of agriculture, nature and food quality. Plus maintaining, expanding and facilitating bilateral government cooperation between the Netherlands and Japan.

FME – Maureen de Haan

FME is an entrepreneurial organization for the technology industry. Their 2,200 members are techno starters, trading companies, medium and small industry (mki) and large industry / multinationals active in the metal, electronics, electrical engineering and plastic sectors. Their members have 220,000 employees. The combined turnover of the FME members is 91 billion and they export for 49 billion. With this, the FME members realize one sixth of what the Netherlands earns in total with export. 45 trade associations are also affiliated with FME. The focus for partner FME in this project lies on linking and dissemination of the results via WP5. In order to perform this task FME will also use the network of GMV(A community of agrifood machinery manufacturers). Both parties are in this project plan referred to as ‘FME/GMV’, while the CA is signed with the legal entity ‘De vereniging FME’.

NTT Group – Takuya Murayama

Headquartered in Tokyo, with business operations in more than 50 countries and regions, we emphasize long-term commitment and combine global reach and local intimacy to provide premier professional services from consulting and system development to business IT outsourcing. Since 1967, NTT Group has played an instrumental role in establishing and advancing IT infrastructure. Originally part of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, its heritage contributed to social benefits with a quality-first mindset. A public company since 1995, the company builds on this proven track record of innovation by providing novel IT solutions to bring results in a greater quality of life for people, communities, and societies around the world. NTT Group is seeking partners who can collaborate with them to develop new capabilities for companies, new business models or new services that allow us to explore together the possibility to achieve an exponential and scalable leap in the use of novel sensors, fusion methods and data structuring solutions.

Solynta – Michiel de Vries

Solynta is a breeding and biotechnology company based in Wageningen, the Netherlands – the hometown of one of the leading agricultural research institutions in the world. The company develops and applies new breeding technologies to convert potatoes into a hybrid crop. Hybrid potato varieties with superior traits and performance are being generated at a speed that is vastly greater than what can be achieved by traditional breeding. In addition, hybrid potatoes will allow sexual seed propagation, greatly enhancing the speed of product developments and providing tremendous logistical and phytosanitary advantages to the potato industry. For this PPP notably non-destructive, standardized methods to assess potato traits below ground is in Solynta’s interest. Although development of entirely new phenotyping methods is not their core business, Solynta is very much interested to use such technologies. Our extensive breeding program consists of many activities, including various field trials across Europe and the globe, and the very precise phenotyping, which lend itself as in-kind contribution, and that allow such projects to perform more analyses/collect more data than initially expected.

IMEC / OnePlanet – Marcel Zevenbergen and Jan Willem de Wit

The OnePlanet Research Center is a collaboration of nano-technology institute IMEC, Wageningen University & Research, and RadboudUMC supported by the Province of Gelderland. In the center, digital innovations are developed in collaboration with the business community in an open innovation environment that offers solutions to the major societal challenges in the areas of health, environment, sustainability and climate. There is close collaboration with MBO and HBO institutions. One Planet fulfills the ambition to turn FoodValley into the Silicon Valley for Food & Health. One of the spearheads on which One Planet researchers will focus, among other things, on making the food supply more sustainable. This is done, among other things, by developing High Tech Systems for, among other things, monitoring plants and their environmental factors. Affordable and scalable sensor technologies will be developed for this. This makes it possible to measure on a large scale in agriculture and animal husbandry, food processing and the living environment (soil, air and water). Such sensor technology can be applied in robotics and smart systems.

Stichting IMEC Nederland

About 125 employees with more than 20 nationalities work at Stichting IMEC Nederland (IMEC-NL). Research is being conducted in the field of wireless sensor systems, with the aim of developing miniaturized, integrated wireless sensor systems. The research is divided into two main themes "connected health solutions (CHS)" and "internet of things (IoT)". They are based on years of experience in wireless communication, sensor technology, energy-efficient electronics and medical diagnosis. IMEC-NL has been developing wireless sensor system technology for years, especially for consumers, lifestyle and health applications. IMEC-NL is positioned as an intermediary between more fundamental research at universities and product development at companies. IMEC-NL brings technology to a level (TRL> 6) so that it can be transferred to companies for product development. For this we work closely with the companies in a program (open innovation principle) or bilaterally. Stichting IMEC Nederland has extensive experience with European projects and is currently participating in seventeen EU projects. Examples are Multi Sensor Platform project (MSP, development of a multi-sensor platform for indoor and outdoor climate measurements). Next Generation of Body Monitoring (Nexgen, development of chemical sensors for pH and salts in a plaster), Sensor technologies for enhanced safety and security of buildings and its occupants (SafeSens, development of sensors for volatile organic compounds) and Grow! which aims to develop IoT systems to measure the climate and nutrient flows in greenhouses. Role in the project focuses on research, testing, evaluation of sensors, planning, dissemination and reporting.

Wageningen Plant Research – Rick vd Zedde / Corné Kempenaar / Koen van Boheemen / Bernardo Maestrini

Wageningen University and Research (WUR) has a broad experience in precision agriculture, plant phenotyping and machine learning techniques. WUR’s expertise will significantly contribute to the ability to design and develop new sensors, combine these with sensor fusion, explore the potential of state of the art data structuring methods and explore these in a range of use cases. WUR takes on the project coordination on the research activities , and a large team of researchers is involved in the implementation of the technology in the different use cases. Their focus is on integration / alignment with existing infrastructure/ database systems and interlinking the experience and knowledge with other ongoing projects at partners in this PPP. Specifically, WUR has experts in the agro food domain in the field of sensor selection, cultivation knowledge, algorithm development for robotics, computer vision and data analysis. By using methods and techniques WUR is able to set up feasibility tests to validate and report the performance and reliability of these new technologies.

National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO)

The National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) is the core institute in Japan for conducting research and development on agriculture and food. Their overall mission is to contribute to the development of society through innovations in agriculture and food, by promoting pioneering and fundamental R&D. NARO conducts technological development to make agriculture a competitive and attractive industry, and contribute to increasing the nation's food self-sufficiency rate. To this end, they conduct R&D to increase the productivity and safety of agriculture, and lessen production costs; and to promote new markets and future industries by developing value-added agricultural products, through incorporating market needs into respective products. In addition, they conduct R&D regarding global issues such as climate change, and the utilization of local agricultural resources to maximize the multi-functionality of agriculture. The Agriculture and Food Business Research Center has been established to incorporate market needs into research, and thereby contribute to the health and quality of life. This research center aims at enhancing research methods for industry-academia- government collaboration in developing functional products, as well as enhancing NARO's capacity to conduct consistent R&D from the production site to the consumer's table. NARO has signed an agreement to extend the Project Cooperation Agreement for the placement of a NARO liaison scientist at Wageningen University and Research Center (WUR) in Wageningen, Netherlands on June 12, 2019 with the aim to further strengthen the research cooperation. Since promoting research cooperation with WUR is in line with NARO's mission, the joint research collaboration started in May 2015. Dr. Kazuhisa Goto, Administrator for Research Management of NDSC, which is NARO's think tank, has been working as a liaison scientist at WUR.