Beekenkamp Plants Vegetables is doing tests with cameras in the greenhouse

Beekenkamp Plants has entered into a partnership with Applied Drone Innovations. A start-up that develops greenhouse monitoring systems. They collect and process valuable data with the aim of increasing the quality of the crops.

Applied Drone Innovations works with a drone and a camera that can be placed on the tube-rail system in the greenhouse. Currently, the material from Applied Drone Innovations has been tested multiple times in the greenhouse at Beekenkamp Plants Vegetables in Maasdijk.

The first goal for Beekenkamp Plants Vegetables is to digitize the germ counts. The drone flies over the boxes or trays with open field crops and counts the misses, these are the seeds that don’t germinate.

The big advantage of this is that no human mistakes can be made. The boxes or trays are now randomly selected for the germ counts, but in this way all the boxes and trays will be checked with the drone and/or camera.

There are also frequently large batches of young plants in the greenhouse, which is difficult to walk through. This makes it difficult to perform the germ counts in the middle of the batch. The drone can fly and the camera moves over the tube-rail system, so this is no longer a problem.

Both the Beekenkamp Plants research department and the IT department are involved in this project. The written software by Applied Drone Innovations must ultimately be linked to the software of Beekenkamp. This is an important project for the IT department. In this way they help the Beekenkamp Group to innovate and digitize.

The ultimate goal is to make quality measurements based on data. For now the biggest concern is quality measurements for germ counts, in the future a subject such as leaf surface can also be discussed.

The developments in the field of digitization are going very fast, also in the horticultural sector. New technologies such as robotization, drones in the greenhouse and autonomous cultivation ensure that more and more data is being generated. With research and collaborations such as the above, Beekenkamp Plants ensures that they continue to fill in the core value ‘innovative’.