We will have around 10 billion people in 2050.
And it's really a huge challenge to make sure that
everybody has enough food and at the same time
that we make sure that we don't destroy Mother Earth.
We face an enormous challenge.
For the next 40 years, we have to produce the same amount of food
as we did over the last 8,000 years.
And we have to do it far better.
We need toproduce more per square meter.
But at the same time, we have to do it more sustainable.
Less fertiliser, less pesticides, less energy, less water.
More with less and better.
I'm Ernst van den Ende, and together with my
colleagues, we work on the next Green Revolution,
focusing on healthy diets for a healthy planet.
What you see in a high-tech greenhouse today is
that we can almost can control everything, so we
control the light, we can control the temperature,
we can control the carbon dioxide.
Every plant has its own drip irrigation
and we collect the water, we reuse it again.
And that's a way to produce more crop per drop.
Or you also could say more cash per splash.
Which is a more sustainable way of producing your food.
I am now standing in the so-called winter light greenhouse.
In winter of course, we have less light,
but we want to produce in this case, cucumbers
and by coatings on the roof. We are now able to harvest
10 percent more light. And it's a very easy rule.
One percent more light gives one percent more productivity.
So, in this greenhouse, we are
testing different light conditions in relation to the production of cucumber.
LED lighting offers us
possibilities to test different kinds of lights.
So we have blue light, red light and every type of
light has a different effect on the production of crops.
And that offers us a lot of new possibilities.
With LED lighting, we are not only focusing on productivity.
So, by using LED light,
we were able to increase the resilience of the
crop in such a way that we are using less
pesticides because they are more resistant or more
tolerant to pests and diseases.
Pesticides, they have a very negative effect in the environment.
Of course, they are targeted,
they will destroy pests, but at the same time,
they have side effects.
So, in most greenhouses in the Netherlands,
we control the pests by bio control, and this is an example.
Here you see spider mites and these spider mites control mites in cucumber.
And it's a way of
producing a sustainable crop at the end of the day
because we are using less pesticides.
So we are now in the facilities that we have in place for
vertical farming or indoor farming.
Most of the vertical farming on a global scale is focusing on
the production of leafy vegetables. But we are
looking at other crops and in this case, we look
at soybean and we are testing the effect of
temperature and light on the protein content.
And hopefully we get some more insights if it's
possible to have soybean production in an indoor farm.
And that is using the space that is available in a far more sustainable way.
Part of sustainability is also that we are looking
for options for autonomous greenhouse growing and
try to have the computer as a manager for growing your crops.
To do that, we need a lot of data.
And in this greenhouse you see that we are collecting data,
we are measuring the weight of a crop.
We are taking pictures of crop to get an idea on plant growth.
We are measuring interception of light
in different levels of the crop.
And all these data we can use in algorithms
and these algorithms will be the basis for autonomous greenhouse growing.
There is lots of technical innovations taking place.
Especially on imaging,
so using robotics for harvesting, for instance.
Using cameras to see whether a plant has a certain disease or not.
Very often today, we see that a plant is suffering
from diseases much quicker than you can do with your own eyes.
I'm quite optimistic, but my only
nightmare is that we don't have enough labor
because it's not so sexy to become a farmer.
It's not so sexy to work in greenhouses.
And what you see nowadays is that a lot of people and that
holds true for every country, that it's really
hard to find the farmers of the future.
It will be a necessity to have autonomous greenhouse or AI
in place to be of help to really reach these optimal
levels and reaching the optimal quality.
So why should you grow tomatoes in a greenhouse
instead of growing tomatoes in an open field?
You will end up with four kilograms of tomatoes in
Spain, in an open field situation. In a greenhouse
in the Netherlands, you will probably harvest 80
kilograms of tomatoes at the end of the growing
season. Which is 20 times more, and that on itself
is already more sustainability.
But the best part of the story is, of course, that we are using less
water in this case, four times less water if you
compare it with an open field situation.
We grow our tomatoes under biological control without
using pesticides. So, at the end of the day, we
have a system that is far more sustainable than an
open field situation.
And I can assure you how we do a lot of scientific
research also in consumer panels that tomatoes
from a greenhouse are still very tasty.
And and of course, that is an important factor.
The challenge with the greenhouses will be energy, of course,
and that's also something where we do a lot of
research.
This is a very special greenhouse. Normally,
greenhouses use gas for heating, and in this case,
we use durable or sustainable energy.
It's generated by windmills, for instance.
Costs an awful lot of money to put a
greenhouse somewhere, especially these high technology.
Then really, only the rich people can afford it.
But for sure, there are also solutions in between.
We call that the adaptive greenhouse concept.
So, what we do is we look at, in a certain country
and then we come up with the
perfect design that fits the local situation.
And sometimes these are only plastic funnels,
but that's already far better than growing your food
in an open situation, sometimes because you can
better control the diseases or you are more efficient in water.
I see it as a great responsibility for Wageningen University and Research
that we do not only focus on big companies or Western countries
but that we especially look at all these challenges for
smallholder farmers in Africa and in Southeast Asia,
and then come up with solutions and go step
by step towards more sustainable and affordable food
and healthy diets for a growing population in the world.
Today, there are around two billion people suffering from malnutrition.
So, there is an urgency to come up with healthy diets for a healthy planet.
Due to climate change. We see a lot of areas already in the south of Europe
but also in Africa, where it really becomes impossible to produce food.
And we need to come up with solutions.
It is a big challenge to feed the world in 2050 with 10 billion people,
and at the same time we see all these challenges
of biodiversity and climate change.
But I think that we have a lot of options to come up with solutions, so I'm optimistic.