As a fruit grower, how do you determine the right time for irrigation, frost protection, and spraying that is truly effective? Many choices in the orchard are still made based on experience and intuition. However, more and more growers want to support these decisions with data from their own plots.
In Zeeland, fruit growers René Bal and Toon Steijn have been working specifically on this for several years. In a recent background article in the trade magazine Nieuwe Oogst, they explain how they use data from their pears and apples to optimize cultivation – with the help of the Wolky Tolky base station and sensors.
Measuring what is really happening in the tree
In the middle of a block of Conference pears stands the Wolky Tolky base station, connected to various sensors in the orchard.
These measure, among other things:
- temperature at different heights
- leaf wetness
- humidity and air pressure
- wind direction
- light intensity
- trunk diameter and fruit diameter via a dendrometer
This dendrometer plays an important role. During the growing season, it is clamped around a pear and records the fruit diameter every five minutes. This provides the grower – instead of just a feeling – with a continuous growth curve of the fruit.
What do you use that for?
- Irrigation: with a limited freshwater source, you want to know exactly when to provide water or not. The growth curve helps to identify stress moments in the tree and respond accordingly.
- Resilience: stress in the tree is linked to susceptibility to diseases such as black fruit rot. By reducing stress, you work towards a more resilient crop.
As co-founder of Wolky Tolky, Yannick Smedts, describes it: increasingly managing outdoor crops toward a desired result, just as has been done in greenhouses for years.
From data to practical decisions
Collecting data is never an end in itself. It is about enabling the grower to make better choices every day. At the Steijn–Bal partnership, this happens on several fronts:
-
Night frost monitoring:
Thanks to temperature measurements at different heights in the orchard, they know exactly when the Tow & Blow wind machine needs to run. The machine is now configured so that the fan switches on automatically based on the measured data. -
Targeted crop protection:
Leaf wetness data and temperature are linked to warning systems for diseases such as scab. This allows sprayings to be better timed or sometimes even skipped. -
Assessing insect pressure:
For the pear sucker, a warning model from PC Fruit is fed with the orchard’s own climate data. This makes the assessment of insect pressure more specific and provides more guidance for the question: “Should I intervene now, or can it wait?”
Step by step, an increasingly factual picture of what is happening in the orchard emerges. Not only at the moment itself, but also over multiple seasons.
Cloudia: a chatbot for the grower’s data
Because the amount of data is increasing rapidly, Wolky Tolky is also working on a next step: Cloudia, a chatbot that helps growers understand their own data.
Think of questions such as:
- “When did I have the most growth stress last season?”
- “How does fruit growth this year differ from last year?”
- “How does my growth curve compare to other companies?”
Cloudia should be able to answer these questions in plain language and help growers more quickly establish links between climate, growth, and cultivation measures.
Working toward ‘work smarter, not harder’
The Wolky Tolky base station accommodates about twenty sensors and is now used by over a thousand users in 35 countries, from fruit growers to seed breeders. Recently, Wolky Tolky won an entrepreneur award in the municipality of Peel en Maas with the theme “Work smarter, not harder” – exactly what automatic monitoring in cultivation systems makes possible.
The story of the Zeeland fruit growers clearly shows what this means in practice:
- less guesswork, more management
- better management of limited water resources
- more targeted use of machinery and resources
- a more resilient crop by reducing stress
Want to manage your orchard based on data too?
Are you a fruit grower and would you like to know what your own weather and growth station can mean for your situation – for example, for irrigation, night frost protection, or crop protection?
Please feel free to contact us. We would be happy to assist you with:
- which sensors are most relevant for your crop and soil;
- how you can start small and expand later;
- how you can link your data to existing warning systems and models.
Read the full article about the Zeeland fruit growers and Wolky Tolky on the Nieuwe Oogst website:
Zeeland fruit growers collect data in the orchard.