CU LTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY NPPL participant Martin de Meijer: ’I didn’t want to be faced with all kinds of things that don’t work’ In recent months, the National Experimental Garden for Precision Farming (NPPL) has organised meetings hosted by various participants in the project, under the name NPPL on Tour. Arable farmer and potato grower Martin de Meijer from the village of Hoek was one of them. He shared his earliest experiences in the area of precision farming with fellow arable farmers, crop consultants, teachers, students, civil servants and the trade press. Participation in the NPPL offered Martin De Meijer, among other things, the opportunity to look for precision techniques to tackle weed everywhere on the different parts of a plot. T wo years ago, De Meijer, as one of the first six in the Netherlands, was given the opportunity to participate in the NPPL in a lottery consisting of no fewer than 65 entries. Prior to his registration, however, he had doubted the added value of participation, he quite openly admitted. Among other things, he wondered whether the current techniques would be sufficiently ready to be applied on his farm. ‘I didn’t want to run into all kinds of things that didn’t work’, he described his main fear. Acceptance of precision technology slower than hoped for De Meijer is not the only farmer in the Netherlands who fears precision techniques that don’t work. ‘It’s a fear that many arable farmers in the Netherlands have experienced for some time now and this is exactly why NPPL was set up’, explains NPPL project leader Corné Kempenaar at De Meijer’s arable farm. For the government, which was still the Ministry of Economic Affairs at the start two years ago, the adoption of precision farming is going more slowly than had been hoped. After all, the first innovations have already been around since 1990, Kempenaar says. What small-scale tests have shown so far is that precision farming can lead to benefits such as a more efficient and therefore lower use of products, which in turn can benefit the environment and the farmers’ purses, he further explains. ‘So, why haven’t the farmers yet fully embraced these techniques? They’re not committing themselves, partly because the range of different available techniques is too diverse, and it also requires a lot of effort to link them up. For example, this could be due to the difficult exchange of computer data, or the different ways in which digital maps are displayed in the various readers. NPPL was set up precisely to overcome that impasse’, explains the project leader. Tackling weeds on variegated soils. De Meijer initially had more or less the same reluctance when it came to investing in this domain, he says. However, when he was considering taking part in NPPL, he also realised that his farm had a persistent problem, namely the presence of different soil types. ‘For example, the clay fraction within a plot can vary from 15 to 40 percent, which has its Potato World 2019 • number 4 19 Pagina 18
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