Profile
David Wallerstein, American, is a kind of CEO – Chief Exploration Officer – at Tencent, a Chinese tech giant. Officially, he is Senior Executive Vice President. Recently, Wallerstein’s thirst for exploration has lighted upon agriculture and horti- culture and in particular on the Autonomous Greenhouse.
to produce the food for an entire country or continent. That is still how they do things in the US. Three-quarters or more of the fruit and vegetables eaten by Americans are grown in the Central Valley in California. But growers there are facing worsening droughts and soil erosion, and extreme weather caused by climate change is making this kind of cultivation more and more risky.”
So, each town would have its own autonomous greenhouse? “Exactly. Food produced closer to consumers. Maybe even an autonomous greenhouse for each household. Just like the decen- tralised generation of energy from the sun with solar panels on residents’ roofs.”
What role can Tencent play in developing this kind of new approach to cultivating vegetables? “We aren’t planning to move everything to China. We are new in Europe, but we really want to come and do business here. So that even more companies want to work in our cloud and use our payment systems. We are looking forward to partnering in pro- jects that help the world to move forwards, such as discovering more effective pharmaceutical products or better materials, or ways in which the cloud and AI can have a positive impact on the everyday lives of all the billions of people on our planet. Plenty of companies in Silicon Valley are involved in applying AI to market- ing and advertising, but I couldn’t find any looking at AI in food
production. So, I kept searching and found the Autonomous Greenhouse challenge at Wageningen.”
Why Wageningen? After all, there are so many Chinese and American universities to choose from. “Wageningen is number one in the world. And the Netherlands al- ready has plenty of companies working in horticulture around the world. I’ve also visited greenhouses in Iceland, all of them using Dutch technology, I’m told. So, if there is anywhere that is a breed- ing ground for the idea of developing and designing a greenhouse that is largely self-governing, and is capable of utilising this reduced input to increase production, then that place is here.”
And that is something that companies have been working on for years already. Can this competition suddenly accelerate that process? “It’s down to us at Tencent and at Wageningen University & Re- search to make the world aware that we are looking for an auton- omous greenhouse. I have the utmost confidence in what talent can achieve. If we can find the best talents and teams in the world, and if they can perfect their algorithms, then we can learn a huge amount from this process. Of course, it makes good busi- ness sense to want to develop new technology in-house, and to bring this to the market ourselves, but I also believe in applying the hacker mentality. Let’s get our hands dirty.”
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 25 May 2018 43
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