Blueberry Innovators launched innovation activities

Twelve blueberry growers from the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium have set up a joint R&D company under the name Blueberry Innovators. This concerns an external innovation department of their companies with which they want to accelerate and make applicable innovation in the field of smart farming and robotic harvesting and weed control. Blueberry Innovators represents a cultivation area of nearly 300 hectares and its shareholders are active in the cultivation, production and marketing of blueberries.

The first innovation activities of Blueberry Innovators have started and will be further scaled up next year. For example, in collaboration with the Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen, a research project on automatic weed detection and recognition started earlier this year. In 2019, a number of collaborations are expected to be ratified, including those focused on the realization of a harvest robot and the application of big data in blueberry cultivation.

Co-creation

Co-creation is at the heart of all Blueberry Innovators' development programs, because collaboration between growers, techies and researchers ensures that innovative products and services not only 'do what they're supposed to do', but can actually be implemented on the cultivation farm in a business-friendly way. Blueberry Innovators is keen to get in touch with organizations that share the same ambitions. Leon Schrijnwerkers, shareholder of Blueberry Innovators: "The developments in the field of robotics, big data, sensors, autonomous driving vehicles and vision are moving at a rapid pace. By working together with other growers and techies within the Innoveins ecosystem, we are in a much better position to make these innovations actually applicable for our own cultivation and breeding companies. Moreover, this way we make our development programs more effective and cheaper."

Source: Innoveins