Gardin - Themaweek Next Level Data, AI & Robotica - Tim Noordijke

did sign a Hortibus Steyma Veikut 2.000 Session Twinser. We are doing the team weeks from the World Horti Center in Nautwike, and right now we are located in the Robotics and AI Square. It's beautiful area, and over here, we're gonna be recording a lot of podcasts regarding next-level data-driven sensors, AI robotics, and everything that's hip and happening in the world of horticultural technology. And then there is one company, well, we've spoken with them before. I think it's very interesting what they do. I also know that they can be a bit controversial because people have some opinions about them, but maybe we're gonna talk about that later, and maybe we aren't. But I'm here with Tim Nordaika from Garding. It's great to have you. - Thank you for having me, Romi, yeah. - Okay, so I can imagine that not everyone is aware of Garding and what you guys are doing because also the company is not, it's still fairly new, right? Couple of years right now. It's still fairly new, but as we say in Dutch, if you live under a stone, then you probably know us, but we have been in the horticultural sector now for quite some years, so it's very good to be here. But I must say, a lot of things have happened over the past few years and the past year for Garding, so we, you've seen us a lot, I think, in all the media, and at a lot of growers, most importantly. - Yeah, because it's quite cool what you guys are doing, so maybe you can introduce Garding a little bit and maybe explain a little bit about how special it is that technology that you guys are using to measure plant health. - Yeah, so basically what we do is we are using a method that has been used a lot already in science. It's called chlorophyllorescence. You may already forget that term because it's simply just, we like to just call it photosynthesis. We basically measure the performance of the plant. What we do is we mount a sensor inside a greenhouse about one meter above the crop. And then there's a camera in there with computer vision that knows what is a leaf and what is not a leaf. So it really picks every day. It picks new leaves, about 40 different leaves, which means you have a leaf that is fully in the shade, a leaf that's fully in the sun, maybe a leaf that's very close to a LED lamp, maybe one that has a weird shape or, I don't know, and you measure all those different leaves, and then you get an average of how those leaves are doing. So what we do is we shoot a laser at the plant, a blue laser, and then some light comes back, some red light. We basically measure how much red light is coming back, which determines how efficient is your plant, how what percentage of the light is your plant now actually using for photosynthesis. So during the day, that's what we do. We measure how much light the plant is basically using. So you can see I'm giving a lot of light now. The plant is creating a lot of photosynthesis, but it's not using it as efficiently as you could. But during the day electricity could be cheap, the sun is already free. So you want to know, okay, at what point should I maybe start shading and what point should I maybe turn down the lamps to save some electricity and to save costs, or we recently had a girl, actually, who got negative electricity prices. - Okay. - Okay. - So he was like, okay, it's April. My plants might have not been really adapted to the light yet, but it's also very warm. So let's see if I can actually take this electricity and get us an extra photosynthesis. He actually used our data during that weekend. - Very interesting. - To say, okay, this is working. My plants can handle it. They're strong enough, the climate is optimal enough for us to have a lot of sunlight, but also use a lot of LED light. I mean, did some calculations with him and he actually made 40,000 euros. - Wow. - That weekend, just on growing tomatoes and burning electricity that would otherwise been turned to waste. - Yeah, and I think the interesting thing about photosynthesis is also that you can handle, like you can go very quickly, right, with adjusting because you're very real time effects on the plants that you measure. - Exactly, exactly. So every five minutes we'll give you a value, a percentage of how much of the light your plants are actually using for photosynthesis. Now, that five minute value consists of 10 different leaves that we've measured. So every five minutes you get an update on how your plant is doing. So you create this kind of feedback loop of, okay, I'm adjusting something. How does my plant react? Okay, let's now maybe adjust this setting. And eventually, of course, you create your settings where you say, okay, at this amount of inside radiation from the sun, I want to close my screen. At this amount of radiation, I want to turn of my LED lamps. - Yeah, I think there's also some controversy that people are saying, yeah, of course, measuring photosynthesis is really interesting. And it gives you the health of the plant, but it doesn't immediately show where the effect is coming from, right? Is that something that the grower themselves have to like figure out? - That's a very good question. So what we have done this year, so this has been a really cool year for us. So we have introduced a new variable we call alpha. We already forget that name, but what it basically does is every day we look at the past five days and we basically create a curve that shows at what light intensity, the plant has a specific efficiency. So let's say at 300 micromole or 300 watts of radiation, your plant has an efficiency of 50%, it's using 50% of the light. If that is what is usually happening, you could actually measure 55 or 45%, so it's either 5% better or 5% worse, basically. Now, that tells you that something is happening, that tells you that something is happening in the plant, that makes it better or worse with that amount of light. So you get basically another percentage, it's like plus five or minus five. - Yeah. - Now, this tells you that something is happening in the climate or something is happening in irrigation, but that does mean that you need to look at those variables. - Yeah. - We have integrations with Priva, with Rida, with Let's Grow, and you can plot this line, this specific line, Alpha, which, and then you can see, oh, this is something that is related to leaf temperature. - Yeah. - For example, just another example. So in cucumbers, if you light during the night, basically, you maybe give 300 micromole of LED light. - Okay, okay. - If you run your greenhouse at 17 degrees Celsius, you could measure an efficiency that is quite low, maybe a 35%. Now, if you increase the greenhouse temperature to 20 degrees, you could see this to increase to maybe 45%. So that's 10% gap that you can see. - Yeah. - cucumbers create reactivity to this temperature. So this feedback loop means that you will see, okay, I'm changing my temperature. What happens to my efficiency? And you will see Alpha moving from maybe minus 10 to zero, which means that you're on target. So, you get a lot more information, right? - You get a lot more information. This is how you can indeed close this gap where you say, okay, something's happening in the data. - Yeah. - But what is the reason? - Exactly. - And that's what you. - 'Cause I think that that was what, a lot of people were still like wondering about, but then it's cool to hear that there's a lot more knowledge also on that and a lot of innovations. What I'm also interested about, because we haven't even spoken about you personally, what is your job with InGarden? - Yeah, so my name's Tim. I'm a customer success manager. Basically, what I do is I drive around in a Netherlands, I meet with growers, I explain them what photosynthesis is. And then hopefully they're interested and they say, okay, you know what, this is very interesting. Let's start measuring photosynthesis. Now that's actually when my job really starts because every week or every two weeks, I will meet with this growers. - Okay. - And we talk about the data. So we will look in, yeah, at the photosynthesis data, but then we very quickly go into how much LED, how much of your LEDs are you using when you adjust your screen settings. - Yeah. - From day one, there are already a lot of things you can see. - Yeah. - You can discuss the climate. So every one to two weeks, I will meet with these growers, via teams or a person if I'm around already. So that's basically my job. I help growers to understand their plans, create this feedback loop based on plant-driven data, and make adjustments. - So if we look at the different kinds of crops, is there specific crops that growers are already very likely to use the gardening sensors compared to other crops? Like how does the landscape look up? - Yeah, so there's a very big variety of plants that we already measure. So basically everything gets green, we can measure, but of course red lettuce also does photosynthesis so we can also measure red lettuce. But one that recently really stood out were orchids. - Okay. - So that's not a leafy green. It's not the leafy green. I do not recommend eating this at least. It probably takes a while to get the true big lettuce. But yeah, so for example, you can have phalanopsis orchids. Now, what these plants have is they, during the night, they open their stomata, they start breathing. OK. And they take up CO2, and they store it physically in the plant. OK. So you get something which is called malic acid or malate. And it's basically a physical form of CO2. It's like it has all these sugar cubes already in its inside of the plant. Yeah. Now, during the day when the plant receives light, it will use these cubes of CO2, and gradually turn them-- actually turn them into sugars that it can then use to create new leaves and become a salad, basically. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] But after a while, all the CO2 is depleted as used everything. Which means that it now has to open the stomata again, take up CO2, but that heavily influences the photosynthesis. The plant is very efficient with this physical CO2, but not with CO2 from the air. So that exact moment is something that you want to know when that happens. So something that can happen is that on one day at 3 o'clock, and on another day at 5 o'clock, this dip happens. Yeah, exactly. This is usually correlated to how much light the plant has received, because it uses the light to use these building blocks. But it can also happen that you were not giving enough water in the night. And the stomata weren't fully open. Yeah. What I'm curious about is then for different kinds of crops, is then the way guarding systems are set up also different? Or is it more about how the grower handles the same system, but just for a different crop? So is it more the setup of the system or the knowledge of the grower? So we can measure every plant. But every plant is different. So if I have a tomato plant, my leaves don't have to look beautiful. But the system is always the same. The system will always be the same. How you actually use the system will be different. And it's really specific to the crop, which makes my job very interesting, because I get to speak to so many different-- speak to grows growers, bell peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, but also in orchids, phalanopsis, or symbidium growers, which is very interesting, because you will use this data differently every time. Yeah. Yeah. Does the garden help with setting up also as starting with a baseline of knowledge for the grower, because I can imagine not every grower wants to find everything out themselves. And you guys probably have a lot of experience already. So do you help the growers when it comes down to how to interpret the data? Yeah. So there are a couple of different ways how we do that. So when a grower is interested in wants to start, we first have a call or a meeting with him, or her, of course, to see, is this really something valuable for you? What are your challenges? What are the things that you want to solve? And what kind of things are you already trying? In a lot of cases, of course, measuring your plant is going to be very beneficial to you. And then the question is, can you actually make changes? Yeah. And can you actually place the sensor here? Is that something that works? Don't you, for example, if you have all these moving tables in your greenhouse, it could be that you knock the sensor down. So it's very important that we eliminate all those things. So it can really start perfectly from the beginning. And then we meet every week or every two weeks with these growers to really see, OK, what's going on? And we, of course, already have a lot of knowledge on photosynthesis. Yeah, because you also said before we started this conversation, we had a little pre-conversation about what we're going to talk about, and you said, every year, there's still a lot of contact with the growers. And it will stay as long as they're a customer. For sure, yeah, for sure. So our longest customers have been with us for three or four years. Yeah. And we actually still meet weekly with that grower. Of course, this is a very important grower to us, because this grower has seen us grow. We don't just see him growing, but he also sees us growing, of course. Exactly. And he's really helping us. He really knows a lot about our sensor in the journey we've made. So it's really nice to work with growers on what to develop next. So all these suggestions that he gave-- I'm like, OK, I want to be able to distinguish the climate. I want to be able to distinguish what's going on. Those are things that growers tell us. And then we make those adjustments. What in what ways is gardening now evolving? Are there new innovations coming up? Or is it more like using the data you already get and improving the way you handle it? Like in what ways is innovation being done within garden? Yeah. So we're always working on new ways, how to use the data. So this winter, for example, we're going to do a lot of experiments with our growers to see how they can save energy. Energy, of course, is not a very hot topic. So for example, a lot of growers, they will use a set point of how much light they give throughout the day, the DLI. But if you give all these light, for example, in six hours, compared to 18 hours, the 18 hours will always be more efficient for the plant. So we are now trying to help these growers to move from a set point of how much light you give to a set point of how much photosynthesis happens to the plant. So those are-- basically, we're trying to optimize how can you use this data, better and better and better and better, and trying to move towards, OK, this works. Let's make it into something we have standards in the packages that we have for our growers. Very interesting. Can you give me one case that you're very proud of of how garden sensors and technology helped improve a business? Yeah, so we already had this one example where a grower would use lamps during the middle of the day and actually be able to see that they could actually use this electricity, create tomatoes out of it, and use this electricity to get some money. Yeah. I think those examples are really special. Again, this one weekend just made the grower 40,000 euros. Yeah, that's crazy. Which is a lot of money. And I think that's really great that we're moving towards those kind of cases and actually be able to-- because that's what growers are looking for. How much is this going to either save me or how much extra production am I going to get? Especially right now, by the way, with the energy transition and everything going on. Especially right now. So I think that's really interesting. And yeah, it's really cool to be part of this new-- all these new developments that are not only happening at garden but in the whole industry. You see a lot of data science being beneficial to growers. Yeah. OK, awesome. Tim Norda, thank you for being here, being in conversation with me and sharing your knowledge with all of us. It was great to have you over here. And yeah, thank you a lot. Thank you, Naomi. Thank you for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]