This interview is part of the Agriculture’s Next Season report published in The Washington Post.
There’s a long line of horticultural farmers from my mother’s side, so it’s partly genetic, in the blood.
When I was young, I started to work in the greenhouses, mainly with tomato crops. My father always took me to customers when I was a kid, even—construction—so I’m living in the heart of the Westland.
Climate change and water scarcity are central drivers. In the European Union, reduced allowable pesticide use makes outdoor farming increasingly difficult, so going indoors becomes a solution. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia are also investing in protected crops, glasshouses, and greenhouses to secure supply. In a world of de-globalization, food security is increasingly on the political agenda of governments.
Population growth matters, but rising welfare may be an even bigger driver. As people come out of poverty and have more to spend, demand shifts—not just more food, but different food.
It’s still too dependent on the knowledge of a small group of people. We invest heavily in bringing more science, data, sensing, and computer-driven intelligence into the greenhouse. You still need the human factor, but we have to reduce it so the success rate goes up and the risk factor goes down.
If that happens, investor interest will increase rapidly. The past has shown that high-tech agriculture, horticulture, and vertical farming are risky businesses. The glasshouse industry is less risky than vertical farming, which has seen bankruptcies and money burned. In five to ten years, I foresee strong growth—but only if risk comes down. Capital is not the issue; there’s plenty of cash. Risk is.
Plants can get diseases, and there are many variables. Technology helps simplify the system and make it more predictable—hardware, software, and now a shift toward algorithms and AI. The real challenge is combining all of that to make outcomes like harvest forecasts predictable.
Retailers need to know how many kilos of tomatoes are coming onto the market, and today we can’t predict that with enough accuracy. That matters for the market and the grower, and to prevent spoilage. Energy management is also critical to control costs. There are almost too many variables for a human to comprehend; algorithms and AI help make sense of that complexity, turn it into predictability, provide better information for decisions, and reduce risk.
We can build a greenhouse almost anywhere and create the climate the plant needs, so local conditions become largely irrelevant. What matters is the earning model—whether it makes sense financially. The core technologies are climate control, CO₂, humidity, irrigation, and, very importantly, labor. If you fall behind on labor, the plant goes out of balance.
Much still comes down to genetics and plant strategy, which remains largely human-based and will stay that way in the coming years. But we’re increasingly starting to read the plant through technology. It’s all about the efficiency of photosynthesis: if you can control that, you can minimize inputs. Sensors are coming onto the market that can read this directly.
On energy, we can now heat greenhouses with low-grade heat—40 degrees instead of 85—which makes it possible to use waste heat, for example, from data centers. That opens pathways toward a near-zero CO₂ footprint for vegetable production. CO₂ itself is also changing. Traditionally, closed greenhouses inject CO₂, but we’ve found ways to use outside air instead. Atmospheric CO₂ levels are now high enough—if you can deliver that air effectively to the plant—to support efficient photosynthesis without injection. These are the shifts happening in the industry right now.
In tropical climates, greenhouses need air conditioning to dehumidify, which is often neither sustainable nor financially feasible. Cooling requires a lot of energy. It makes more sense to build in areas where cooling can be done cheaply. Higher ground and desert regions tend to have lower humidity; with low humidity, you can cool by adding moisture to the air. Logically, we can build anywhere in the world. Financially, it doesn’t always make sense.
Our technology is currently limited to five or six crop types, and about 95% of our market is fruit and vegetables. In Europe, that’s mainly tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. Strawberries and lettuce are still partly field-grown, but both are increasingly moving indoors.
We run research in our own test greenhouses, looking at crops grown outdoors—such as winter production in Egypt, Ethiopia, or Morocco with long logistics chains—and assessing whether we can grow them indoors with good returns and a similar cost price. In the United States and the Middle East, demand for indoor-grown lettuce and strawberries is strong. Our main growth today is in the Middle East, Europe, and Canada.
The US is relatively slow because of tariffs. As costs rise, customers struggle and it’s difficult to increase selling prices. I had a customer growing orchids in the US who planned to build a new facility, but didn’t. Ceramics and plastics from China, plant material from the Netherlands, bark from Finland—those inputs pushed the cost price up, and he couldn’t sell for more.
Due to costs, it’s not feasible to operate large facilities in the US. In Canada, it’s much easier to build and operate—permit-wise and regulatory-wise—and energy is cheaper. Many assume future growth in indoor growing will be in the US, but think of a hamburger: Mexico and Canada are the bun, and the US is the burger. Canada and Mexico supply the majority of produce to the US.