A day of a crop specialist

A day in the life of a Cultivation Specialist

The day starts early, at 6:00 the alarm goes off, I stay in bed for a while until 6:15 to then freshen up and get ready for another working day.
As I step out the door towards my car, my working day begins, you can already feel the climate outside, chilly, hot, muggy, all conditions that affect my work.

Arriving at the garden, I put on the company outfit and have a cup of coffee and a sandwich, when the outside conditions are different from expected, I immediately sit down at my computer to check the current climate. I immediately adjust settings where necessary, open the windows a little more or less, keep the top screen closed longer on a colder morning or open it a little faster when the temperature is warmer. These are all small things that influence the climate in the greenhouse and thus affect the plant.

Then I check the temperature in all sections from the previous night, a greenhouse is divided into several sections that we can all control separately with windows, heating and screening. The area of the greenhouse is too big to do the same control for the whole greenhouse. Because the wind can come from a different direction every day, we notice a certain airflow in the greenhouse as a result. This ensures that in each section of the greenhouse, the plant grows slightly differently from another section. After all, plants are just like people; we are broadly similar but all slightly different.

As a cultivation specialist, you will be working daily to create or maintain the right healthy plant stand in each department. At certain times of the year, we direct the plant to send more energy to the fruit to harvest chunkier tomatoes. At another period of the year, we may want the plant to produce a bit more leaves to better cope with evaporation with hot and sunny weather. We do this by adjusting the greenhouse climate to the outdoor conditions.

Each tomato variety has its own description and way it would prefer to grow itself, one variety naturally puts a lot of energy it gets from the sun into making lots of leaves, the other makes far fewer leaves and puts all the energy from the sun into making lots of bunches and chunky tomatoes. As cultivation specialists, we know the characteristics of a plant and respond to them with our controls.

After checking the climate of all departments, I look at watering. Tomato plants grow on rockwool and through various sensors we have a good idea of the plant's water and nutrient needs. When the plant is growing nicely, it is also creating new roots, which are essential for absorbing water and nutrients. To allow the roots to grow as well as possible, we water from 9:00 to 18:00 on average, with smaller turns each time. Just a little different from the plants in your living room. To keep the roots as good as possible, we give little or no water at night so the plants can empty the slab. You might think that if the mat was saturated for 24 hours, the plant would always have enough water at its disposal. The problem is that if roots are submerged for long periods, they rot and die, with the result that the plants can no longer absorb water. If the mat is not dry enough in the morning, we choose to start watering later. If the plant has absorbed more water at night due to circumstances, we can also choose to start earlier. I check this daily.

After all the checks are done on the computer, I go into the greenhouse. Each time I go into the greenhouse I check 2/3 paths with the aim of having been in each section every day. In a path I assess the plant on a number of characteristics, by reading the plant and taking into account the upcoming outdoor conditions I know how the climate control for that day should be done.
Points on which I judge the plant include:

• Plant colour, the head can be a darker colour but also lighter. We can often tell from the colour of the plant whether it still wants to grow well or whether the greenhouse conditions are too harsh for it and it wants to grow less.
• Plant vigour, a healthy strong plant makes better and stronger bunches, we often strive to have a somewhat more vigorous crop stand as this also makes the plant more resilient to any pests and diseases
• Crop mode, does the plant make a lot of leaves or does all the energy go to the bunches, a vegetative or a generative mode we call it. This is where I try to find the balance every time
• Fruit halfway through the plant, they still swell sufficiently and have a good glossy colour
• Bunch quality at the bottom, how coarse are the tomatoes finally just before harvest, how quickly do they colour through, do the tomatoes stay hard
• Root quality, by assessing this every day I can see if the mats are sufficiently dry in the morning. In addition, I can immediately see whether there is sufficient new root development

After I have done my cultivation round, I am going to do the harvest forecast. Every week we have to specify how many kg we are going to cut. We have to do this so that sales knows how many tomatoes to expect and therefore have to sell. By counting in a number of paths scattered through the garden the bunches we expect to be harvestable that week, we can calculate from the coarseness of the tomatoes how many kg per m2 and thus across the whole garden we can cut. This can range from 50,000 kg to 350,000 kg per week, depending on the time of year.

After this, it is time to work with them, weekly I want to do some crop operations to get a good picture myself of what is going on. By doing this and not just making a visual assessment, you automatically notice things that I as a cultivator can get information from about the plant.

Early in the afternoon, I will prepare the fertiliser trays. For the plants to grow as well as possible, they need certain types of fertiliser in addition to water. These can be as many as 15 different kinds of fertiliser. We might put in 200 grams of one kind, or 500 kg per 10 m3 of another. Very big differences in quantity but both equally important.
With any fertiliser, we can steer the plant in a certain direction to grow.

At the end of the afternoon I assess the crop again, I can then read whether the indoor climate conditions have been good for the plant, if the plant has a dark colour it may be that the plant has had to work above its capabilities and that I have asked too much. A lighter colour could mean that the growing conditions were too easy for the plant so we didn't get the most out of it. The plant position at the end of the day again has implications for setting the night to come. After assessing the plants, I sit down at my computer to assess until what time to water, until what time to stoke and how high the night temperature should be for the plant.

After setting this, I go home, but then the day doesn't end. In the evening, I can still operate the climate computer from home. Here I can keep an eye on whether the temperature has dropped sufficiently, whether the plant's water uptake is fast enough and make any necessary adjustments. I do this once or twice a night; the better I estimate conditions, the less I need to adjust and it doesn't take much time.