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Very excited to share that Growers United and Saia Agrobotics will start a pilot together! On March 5th, the Growers United Cooperative, 29 fruiting vegetable growers, 750 hectares, signed an agreement with SAIA for a market pilot in continuous cultivation, as a first step towards robotization. This pilot will take place in the Growers United R&D Center at PROOF. Here, Growers United growers will get to work with the system to assess in practice whether this cultivation method meets the requirements for quality and yield. If the test is successful, a second phase will follow in 2026, in which the cultivation will be expanded with a market ready robotization for leaf pruning and harvesting. Is continuous cultivation the next step in fruiting vegetables? In recent years, SAIA Agrobotics has developed an innovative cultivation system that distinguishes itself from traditional substrate cultivation in gutters by growing in “mist”. In this system, the roots of the plant are regularly cut, which causes the plant to continuously produce new roots. This results in an ever-young crop. This cultivation method offers enormous advantages in terms of sustainability: no more substrate mats, year-round cultivation for 12 months and no annual cultivation of new plants. In addition, it is much easier to apply crop treatments individually per plant. And can the plant then leave the greenhouse on its way to a “pruning session” with the robot in a processing hall? What makes this approach unique is that the plant can leave the greenhouse via a transport system and be moved to a central processing hall. There the plant is pruned robotically, ripe trusses are harvested and valuable plant data is collected. This creates a completely new cultivation method within high-tech high-wire greenhouses for fruit vegetables. The innovation is also in the relative simplicity of the system: this makes it possible to 'retrofit' modern greenhouses with a continuous cultivation, transport system and automation. tags: HortiTech #agtech #greenhouse #tomato