The three-row Poulsen Robovator hoeing both between rows and within each row of strawberry plants. The rows are 1,50 meters apart, the plants are 30 centimeters apart in a row.
between weeds and plants. The system uses the plant spacing in the row (30 centimeters) and the size of the plant as a basis, but if weeds are too large, the machine will also rec- ognise them as strawberry plants and leave them in.”
Few chemicals, less labour The underlying aim of using hoeing machines, and the Poulsen Robovator in particular, is to reduce the use of herbicides and the amount
of manual labour as much as possible. “Both we and our client endeavour to reduce the use of crop protection products, preferably to none at all,” says Sjaak Huetink. “Herbicides result in stunted growth and plants with lower resist- ance, and therefore reduce the quality of the new propagating material. But the costs of hoeing and weeding need to be weighed up against that. Usually, we manage 4 to 5 hec- tares per day with the flat-bed weeder, and thanks to the Robovator, the flat-bed weeder
Bulb grower Sjaak Huetink
A tablet visualises for each row what the camera sees (left, green) and how the algo- rithm translates this to strawberry plants or weeds (right, blue).
Sjaak Huetink (53) runs Huetink Bloembollen in Lemelerveld (NL) together with his brother Henri. They lease all the land they need (around 300 hectares) on an annual basis. They also grow 130 hectares of lilies, 100 hec- tares of first-year onion sets, 30 hectares of strawberry plants, and 30 hectares of corn and other crops, plus wildflower borders.
can be speeded up. Now, they have fewer weeds to pick out, plus many weeds are al- ready pulled up and laid to dry as they should. However, once the runners have been laid out, it is no longer possible to hoe, and what is more, we have to spray them with water every day. By the end of July, we can take stock of everything. Even so, we have never before sprayed so few herbicides, spent so few hours weeding, and never before have we had such weed-free plots!”
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 27 August 2019
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