The winning entries were praised by the judges for their high level of professionalism
Organifarms and Biobest have been crowned winners of this year’s GreenTech Innovation Awards.
Organifarms scooped the Concept Award for BERRY, its strawberry harvesting robot, while Biobest wins the Innovation Award for its Micromus-System, a generalist predator for protected crops.
Announcing the results at the opening of GreenTech Amsterdam 2022 on Tuesday, jury chair Liselotte de Vries of the TU Delft AgTech Institute said: “This year we received submissions with a wide variety, which is exciting to see after the past challenging years.
“The jury looked at biological-, production- and digitization technologies. A selection of these were nominated for the Innovation and Concept Awards”.
De Vries praised the winning entries for their product and their professional submissions.
“Both presented the jury with a high level of details, based on facts and figures and a very concrete insight into their product, company and business plans,” she said. “We encourage future submissions to follow this level of professionalism.”
Organifarms’ BERRY is a harvesting robot for strawberries automating the detection of position, ripeness, and quality of the fruit.
The German company said the robot can detect the exact degree of ripeness of each fruit, harvest it safely and place them directly into punnets which are weighed and ready for sale.
De Vries said: “An interesting technology, strong team and strong network of partnerships that can contribute to the flexibility and swift development of BERRY”.
The Micromus-System by Belgium’s Biobest is a generalist predator of which both adults and larvae feed on all common aphid species found in protected crops.
The brown lacewing Micromus angulatus is a generalist predator feeding on all common aphid species found in protected crops such as vegetable, soft fruit, medicinal cannabis and ornamental crops. Both larvae and adults prey on aphids.
De Vries commented: “With this winner the jury expressed its support to continue the development of new sustainable innovations of IPM programmes”.
The winners, nominees and entries for the Innovation Awards will be showcased during the three-day exhibition.
The longlist of all the entries of the Innovation Awards can be viewed at: https://www.greentech.nl/amsterdam/innovations/products/. A full list of nominees is available at: https://www.greentech.nl/amsterdam/innovations/nominees/
