Het dashboard voor je akkers, je teeltadviseur en boekhouder in één. Dat is min of meer wat AgriSim behelst, dat de The dashboard for your fields, your crop consultant and your accountant all in one. This, roughly, is what AgriSim is about, with the whole world as its playing field and at the same time a hyperlocal scope: 10 x 10 metres, the scale of the Sentinel satellites. It is a tool that distils practical crop farming advice from big data such as satellite images, geo-information systems and the farmer’s own data, thus helping arable farmers to optimize their yields.
The driving force behind AgriSim is Ronald de Bruijn, originally an econometrician and therefore someone who is completely at home with figures, statistics and risk calculations. He first came into contact with big data for agriculture more than 10 years ago, as a sideline to the Turkish e-commerce business he was working for at the time. ‘I suddenly had 10 years’ worth of Turkish agricultural data in my hands,’ he says. The systematic data mining of this data ran aground due to the political changes in Turkey. But the seed for AgriSim had been sown.
It is a tool that distils practical farming advice from big data
De Bruijn has now been working on campus for about five years – more because of Wageningen as a place to live than because of WUR, which in his view is ‘not very innovative, to be honest’. At Plus Ultra II, he helps young entrepreneurs at StartHub to get launched. He also continues to develop AgriSim, for example with a new function that sounds the alarm if a potato field is threatened by diseases such as phytophthora or Erwinia. It makes preventive use of crop protection unnecessary, and therefore cuts back on expenditure and toxins. And De Bruijn never gets tired of innovations like these
There are about 100 companies on the campus. We introduce them to you in Resource. This time, AgriSim in Plus Ultra II.
