They say the Westlands area in The Netherlands, situated about an hour’s train trip southwest of Amsterdam, is packed so densely with greenhouse operations that at night the vast array of secondary lighting switching on can sometimes obscure the locals’ view of the stars.
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Tour Stop #1: Best Plant
Best Plant owner Patrick Zuidgeest (left) and WPS International Account Manager Willem Jan Hoogduin discuss Zuidgeest's operation and how automation allows the company to right size its labor force inside Best Plant's 7.5 hectare greenhouse near De Lier.
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Best Plant's Spathiphyllum
Spathiphyllum plants, Best Plant's specialty, move along WPS' SmartFlo automated conveyor-based setup to an area where they will be spaced and flood irrigated from the floor. The company also specializes in hydrangea and begonia.
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How WPS and Best Plant move plants across aisles
The WPS SmartFlo system has moveable, customized end of row "conveyor legs" to ensure Best Plant does not have to carry or tow individual plants across the concrete aisles that separate various areas of the greenhouse.
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Tour Stop #2: Forever Plants
After seeing the SmartFlo system in place at Best Plant, the group headed across the Westland canals and narrow highways to arrive at our second stop, Forever Plants. We toured one of Forever Plants 9 hectare greenhouse operations where the grower takes automation one step further than at the previous stop.
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Forever Plants' Erik Persoon
Forever Plants owner Erik Persoon discusses some of his group's labor challenges with tour attendees.
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Forever Plants Yucca Plants
Persoon shows tour attendees the company's flagship product, Yucca plants sourced from growers in Costa Rica and Guatemala. The Yuccas reportedly created a bit of a challenge for the group at WPS, as the plants start out very small and grow to be quite large and top heavy, a factor WPS accounted for by adjusting some of its conveyor movement algorithms to ensure the Yuccas don't tip over during transit around the SmartFlo system.
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Forever Plants Yuccas
These nearly finished Forever Plants Yuccas will be shipped from the Westlands to home improvement, garden centers, and grocery stores across The Netherlands and the EU.
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Forever Plants end-of-row system
A tour attendee, Mohsine Elkhanza, a cannabis consultant for Growmasters B.V. based in Amsterdam, and a WPS rep inspect the automated plant distribution system that allows a worker to source different combinations of finished plants for shipping. The system uses machine learning and sensors to recognize the individual plants the worker needs to fill his shipping skid and send them along the WPS SmartFlo conveyor system to the crew packing the shipping orders.
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Tour Stop #3: KP Holland
Our third and final stop on the tour was at KP Holland, a breeder and grower with 16 hectares of greenhouse space manned by 140 employees. A veritable plant factory (think LEAN Manufacturing principles) where potted plants whiz across a roller coaster-like ecosystem of conveyors, sensors, and robotic innovations, KP was easily the highest level of automation witnessed on the tour. KP was hosting its annual Summer Trials during the WPS visit.
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KP Holland's Roy van der Knaap
van der Knaap is KP Holland's Manager of Energy & Technique, and has instrumental in helping the company automate its greenhouse processes since 1998. The greenhouse we toured has been using WPS automation solutions since 2008. van der Knaap and Co. boast a nearly completely "hands off" greenhouse automation system, as it is rare that human hands touch any of the plants during the production process.
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KP Holland upstairs plant finish area
After the cuttings are planted, rooted, and propagated, they travel up a conveyor system to the above second story finishing area, where the plants will be automatically spaced and await being called down to the packing area via a worker filling out digital shipping orders on a computer station on the first floor.
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KP Holland exports
The wide variety of ornamental and other consumer-facing plants produced by KP Holland will make their way to garden centers and other retailers across the EU. This skid of plants will make their way to Italy and into the homes and gardens of Italian families.
Greenhouse Grower took an afternoon away from the bustle of the GreenTech 2019 Conference and trade show at RAI Amsterdam to join We Prove Solutions (De Lier, Netherlands) on a tour of three greenhouse operations that have invested in varying levels of WPS’ customized automation setups.
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First, a little bit about We Prove Solutions, or WPS, a 60+ employee, family-owned greenhouse technology consulting group based in De Lier. The company’s main philosophy and go-to-market can perhaps be summed up, as WPS marketing director Xenia Klop established on the way over from the Delph train station, in a single sentence: “We believe that plants should move to people, not the other way around.”
How exactly does WPS make plants come to people? It’s a compelling ecosystem of various sensors, conveyor belts, rugged controllers, data capture and advanced algorithms, all blended together with that world renowned Dutch ingenuity.
Willem Jan Hoogduin, International Account Manager with WPS, hosted the group for the tour along with Klop and a few other WPS reps.
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“With our tour, we’ve started out at greenhouses that have a fairly basic level of automation and then worked our way up to higher levels of automation,” Hoogduin says. “This can help visualize the steps that can be taken by a grower or different solutions that are possible for a grower that has little or no automation.”
Jan Hoogduin confirmed that greenhouse growers in The Netherlands are facing similar labor force issues as growers in the U.S. and Canada. Jobs in the greenhouses across the Westlands that were traditionally filled by Polish and other immigrant populations are often going unfilled as those workers increasingly either seek out digital-based occupations instead, or find higher paying occupations back home.
“At WPS, we want to help the grower find the solution he needs for his greenhouse,” Hoogduin says. “The first step is always to see what actions can be taken to smooth the labor process and find the spots where labor can be made easier or can be automated.”
Additionally, the tour featured a legal cannabis bent, although it bears noting that, aside from the nine growers recently approved by the Dutch government to start producing cannabis legally for the EU’s burgeoning medical cannabis market, producing cannabis in Holland is still quite illegal.
“Growing cannabis in the Netherlands is only allowed under very strict conditions and only for medicinal purpose,” he explains. “So, we had to improvise for this. We’ve shown several systems that can be implemented in the cannabis growing market, and again, that all depends on how the grower wants or needs to grow.”
Although we didn’t see any actual cannabis plants on the tour, after the three greenhouse visits, it’s rather easy to envision where WPS could fit in on our side of the pond in helping legal cannabis producers automate and track many of the processes involved.
“For example,” Hoogduin shares, “A medicinal grower (in North America) would need to account for all his plants in the greenhouse, from day zero. Therefore, he would want to use a system that is controllable and tracks and traces every single plant. For that we offer our Walking Plant System with track and trace software.
“This is the highest level of automation and perfectly suitable for medicinal growers, or the ones that want to know every single detail of each plant for quality control.”
WPS’ Walking Plant System, as well as its SmartFlo conveyor belt-based plant movement solution, were both really impressive in the amount of automation and labor savings they can help a grower achieve. Check out the slideshow above to see some of the visuals from the tour, and for more information, WPS has a blog that spells out the company’s position and philosophies.
015GreenTech '19: Automation Inspiration Tour Showcases Westlands Growers [Slideshow]
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Matthew J. Grassi is a former Technology Editor for Greenhouse Grower and American Vegetable Grower, both Meister Media Worldwide brands. See all author stories here.
June 28, 2019 
