5 Lessons Learned During 5 Years of Autonomous Growing

By Greenhouse Grower

It was five years ago that five international teams had the opportunity to deliver a unique achievement in Bleiswijk in the Netherlands during the first Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge: remotely controlling a greenhouse without entering the greenhouse. All the climate, irrigation, and energy management data needed to be calculated not only remotely, but completely without human intervention, writes Rudolf de Vetten at Greenhouse Grower. Artificial intelligence (AI) did just that.

And what happened after four months of hard work? What everyone thought would take years suddenly turned out to be possible. Five successful crops were delivered, in some cases with a better cultivation result than achieved by the growers who implemented classic climate control. It may only have been on a small scale, but the first proof had been provided.

Fast forward to 2023. What happened during that time, and what did we learn about Autonomous Growing within Blue Radix? We would like to share these five lessons.

Autonomous Growing Is Already Possible

It’s already possible to grow autonomously on a production scale. We have now run several growing seasons with our growers. Some growers have been involved in the development since 2019. While initially we could only predict the climate, they have already run autonomously for several crop cycles in tomatoes, cucumbers, and bell peppers. This is not a distant future; it’s currently happening in large and small locations of 2 to 60 hectares in the Netherlands, Canada, the U.S., Mexico, South Korea, and dozens of other locations.