The so-called experimental farm in Valthermond is holding an open day today and tomorrow for farmers, neighbors and outdoor enthusiasts. Minister Piet Adema of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality was already given a tour yesterday and emphasized the importance of innovation during his visit.
The Veenkoloniën Innovation Foundation managed to get Minister of Agriculture Piet Adema to kick off the so-called innovation days. He was given a 45-minute tour of the test fields with a farmer’s cart pulled by a tractor. It stopped a number of times, to which Gerard Hoekzema, manager of the test location, explained.
“Here we do not irrigate, on that plot we irrigate with sensors and on a third piece of land we irrigate traditionally,” says Hoekzema. The minister asks whether irrigation with sensors is widely applicable. “We did it last year and there was more yield. But one year is not a year,” he adds.
Several parties in the agricultural sector have been working together for a few years now to stimulate innovation in the Veenkoloniën. These are large parties such as Avebe, Cosun and Agrifirm. But also agricultural collectives, advisory and research parties, such as Wageningen University and education in the form of MBO Terra.
Tanja Beuling is program manager of the Veenkoloniën Innovation Foundation and says that there is a lot going on. “Avebe and other parties are involved in breeding. You therefore need less crop protection products. The Veenkoloniën are also very suitable for precision agriculture.”
An example of such an innovation is the Ecorobotix. That is a device that only sprays the weeds with agricultural poison and not the crops. This can save up to 90 percent of pesticides.
Minister Adema thinks innovation is important, he told the eighty attendees from the agricultural sector in Drenthe. “In The Hague people now think differently about this. That has to do with cattle farming, in which a number of systems have been rejected. Then people say in The Hague: we shouldn’t invest in that anymore. It’s good to see how you are working with innovation here. We will have to pay more attention to that. Innovation is one of the solutions to the major challenges we face.”