They cannot do so as yet, but they are well on the way. Scientists at Wageningen University & Research and the Technical University of Delft are jointly developing a drone that flies like an insect: it is manoeuvreable, light and has flapping wings. They have already made a series of prototypes of their DelFly. The latest version was the subject of an article in the top journal Science last September.

‘We are not aiming to imitate nature precisely,’ says Johan van Leeuwen, professor of Experimental Zoology in Wageningen. ‘And that would not be possible: those natural designs are so full of ingenuity, the product of millions of years of natural selection, that you can’t copy them. What we want is to understand the mechanisms at work in nature and to get inspiration from them for the design of useful applications. We call that bio-inspired design.’

He cites a few classic success stories by way of example: velcro, which is based on the hooks on the burrs of the great burdock plant. Paint that is waterproof and dirt-repellant thanks to nanotechnology, a trick played by the lotus leaf. Buildings designed and positioned just like termite hills so as to catch the wind and ensure air circulation. ‘This approach to design has really taken off in recent years,’ says Van Leeuwen.

Browsing through the natural world

‘It used to be very difficult to get funding for this. Now that there are more and more examples of successes, everyone thinks it’s logical: browsing through the natural world in search of handy new ideas.’

The research is highly interdisciplinary. ‘You use knowledge from zoology, mechanical and fluid dynamics and aerodynamics. We’ve got an engineer on our team with a background in Aerospace Engineering.’

That engineer is Florian Muijres. He works in Wageningen, where he is studying insects’ flight strategies. His equipment for that includes a 3D camera setup which takes 13,500 frames per second. He has been working on the DelFly since 2014. ‘That came out of a Delft student competition 13 years ago,’ says Muijres.

Flying robot

‘Students  of Aerospace Engineering were given an assignment to design a flying robot based on nature, supervised by biologists from Wageningen and engineers from Delft. This resulted in the first DelFly, with propulsion based on that of flying insects.’

‘In the new prototype, the DelFly Nimble, it is not just the propulsion that is bio-inspired,’ says Muijres, ‘but also the manoeuvrability. Insects, birds and bats are very good at that. Just watch a hummingbird in action. It can fly both fast and efficiently, and hover and manoeuvre very deftly. You can only achieve that combination with wings that flap. The way they manipulate the air makes optimal use of the air currents.’

For a long time nobody knew how insects actually do that. A lot more is known about that now, partly thanks to modern camera techniques and computer models. Muijres: ‘Once the biological knowledge was there, Delft colleagues could build it into a robot.’

An insect’s brain

The engineers also wanted to know exactly how an insect can find its way around. ‘The nice thing was that we could start researching that using the robot,’ says Muijres. ‘If we programme it with what we think happens in an insect’s brain, we can then test it to see if we’re right. And you can keep on adjusting it a bit at a time and see what happens then.’

At that point you are moving from engineering territory into that of science, Muijres points out: ‘The biology helps the engineers to design a robot, and then that robot helps the biologists get a better understanding of nature. That interaction is incredibly interesting. That’s what makes this project so unusual and so valuable. And it’s what makes a scientific journal like Science take an interest in a drone.’

Self-steering capacity

‘Just look how elegantly a bee lands on a flower,’ says Guido de Croon, scientific head of the Delft Micro Air Vehicle Lab. ‘The lower it gets, the slower it must fly. We want to build that self-steering capacity into the robot.’ Biologists came up with the idea that the bee responds to an image of the flower, which gets bigger and bigger.

The bee seeks to keep the rate at which the image grows bigger constant, explains De Croon. The closer it gets to the flower, the slower it must fly to keep that expansion steady. ‘But if you programme that into the drone, it doesn’t work,’ he says. ‘At a particular distance from the target, the drone starts shaking. The reason turns out to be that there is always a bit of delay in the system.’

The biologists took another good look at the way bees land. It turned out that during landing they always make a little hop at a certain distance. ‘Our current hypothesis is that the bee notices that it is starting to shake, and adapts its flying behaviour instantly,’ says De Croon. ‘We can make use of that moment to unfold the legs.’

The small fins of the seahorse

Van Leeuwen sees the same sort of interaction between biologists and engineers in other bio-inspired projects in Wageningen. Research on swimming seahorses has provided inspiration for the development of an underwater robot. The seahorse has an unusual method of propulsion, pushing water away mainly with its small fins. It only uses its powerful tail to hold onto aquatic plants.

In cross section, the tail is not round like those of other animals, but square. The tail consists of hard, angular discs ingeniously hooked up together: a system that makes it both sturdy and flexible. Perfect for a robot that moves over the seabed and wants to hold onto plants. ‘We are working on this with the group led by Frans van der Helm – professor of Biomechatronics and Biorobotics at TU Delft,’ says Van Leeuwen.

The tree frog’s legs

Another Wageningen-Delft project focuses on the tree frog’s legs. The tree frog has complicated structures on its fingerpads and toepads, as Wageningen PhD candidate Julian Langowski discovered. The skin cells form little hexagonal pillars there with a network of tiny fluid canals between them. The top of each cell is in turn covered in hexagonal ‘nanopillars’ separated by fluid canals.

This structure makes the tree frog’s foot sole very flexible and the skin can stick so closely to the surface under it that molecular attraction probably takes place. The tiny pillars and fluid canals also facilitate capillary action, meaning the kind of force that will keep two panes of glass together if there is a thin layer of water between them.

If you combine those principles, wrote the researchers in Frontiers of Zoology at the end of August, you can develop new adhesive materials. Van Leeuwen: ‘Together with Delft we are trying to apply this principle in soft tweezers with which you can get a grip on objects with wet surfaces, such as vulnerable tissue during an operation’.

The medical world stands to benefit from bio-inspired design in several areas. ‘We have already patented the system based on the octopus tentacles,’ says Paul Breedveld, professor of Biomechanical Engineering in Delft. ‘That has grown into a major line of research in Delft, leading to the finest steerable surgical instruments in the world, all inspired by Johan’s octopus tentacle. The spinoff company DEAM is now producing them. We expect them to be launched on the market at the end of 2018.’

Something else doctors dream of is a flexible, steerable needle, explains Johan van Leeuwen: ‘A needle that can go round a corner or even take an S bend.’ This would make it possible to avoid vulnerable nerves or blood vessels when injecting a drug very locally, or when aiming to remove fluid or tissue. Van Leeuwen: ‘The ichneumon wasp has a solution to that.’

The ovipositor of the ichneumon wasp

Ichneumon wasps lay their eggs in plants or the larvae of other insects. Some do both: using their ovipositor they drill a hole in a plant, or even in a tree, at a place where a larva is hidden. They lay an egg in the unfortunate larva, which then serves as food for the ichneumon wasp larva.

‘The ichneumon wasp can change the direction of the drilling as it goes along, explains Van Leeuwen. ‘That is possible because the ovipositor consists of three elements which hook up together lengthways.’ One of the elements forms something like rails, which the other reaches around with an extended groove. If you push one of the elements a little bit ahead of the other, the shape of the head of the ovipositor changes, causing it to go in a different direction if the head moves forward. This changes the bend in the tube.

DRILLING AROUND TUMOURS

‘Our PhD researcher Uroš Cerkvenik has filmed this at length in transparent gels,’ says Van Leeuwen. ‘They are beautiful pictures, which show that the female can drill underneath herself in all directions without changing her own position. Imagine what you could do with that, in relation to tumours or in brain surgery, for instance.’

Paul Breedveld adds: ‘The wasp uses a system with ridges which can’t shoot out of the grooves because of their shape. We have a different solution, which is technically much easier to make: we just put a couple of little rings around our needle that keep the loose rods together.’ For nature it is probably easier to make grooves than tubes, but for humans it is the other way round.

The strength of bio-inspired design

‘The strength of bio-inspired design doesn’t lie in imitating nature precisely, but in using nature as a source of inspiration and not being afraid to combine natural principles with smart solutions thought up by humans.’

It will take some time before doctors will be working with a needle that resembles an ovipositor. ‘We’ve got to be realistic about that,’ says Van Leeuwen. ‘In the medical world there are strict safety criteria, so the testing phase is lengthy’.

The same spinoff that makes instruments based on octopus tentacles is developing this concept further now too. ‘After that, it’s the turn of larger companies. It will undoubtedly take quite a few years, but I am sure that  needles inspired by ichneumon wasps are on the way.’

Flapping drones

The creators of the DelFly are similarly confident: they are sure there will be flapping drones flying around one day. ‘For carrying out inspections in places that are hazardous or inaccessible, for example,’ responds Florian Muijres, ‘such as in a factory hall, or to inspect crops in greenhouses. Standard drones are not as suitable for those tasks: they are much heavier and noisier, and they are more dangerous if they fly into people.’

www.wur.eu/bio-inspired-design

Background image: TU Delft

He got the scientific evidence supporting this approach from Wageningen researcher Hannah van Zanten, who obtained her PhD in 2016, with Imke de Boer as her supervisor, on the role of animals in a sustainable food system.

‘Kipster has been going for over a year now and we work closely with the Animal Production Systems chair group. A while ago we had a discussion about rice bran layers: is that a waste product from producing white rice or human food that you shouldn’t use as animal feed? That’s something we ask Hannah.’

Leading the way

Kipster fits perfectly with the minister Carola Schouten’s new vision for farming’s future: Agriculture, Nature and Food: Valuable and Connected (see inset). She wants the Netherlands to lead the way in circular agriculture. ‘In a circular agricultural system, in principle arable farming, livestock farming and horticulture make use of raw materials from each other’s sectors and waste products from the food industry and food supply chains,’ she writes in her vision. ‘In principle, livestock should be fed on grass, feed crops or crop remains from the farm itself or the local area.’

Checklist circular policy

Schouten’s intention with this vision is also to use circular agriculture to resolve various modern-day problems in agriculture, which is currently geared to the global market and low costs. The idea is that circular agriculture will lead to less environmental harm, greater biodiversity, higher incomes for farmers, less wastage of raw materials and food, and lower greenhouse gas emissions. These points will serve as a kind of checklist for testing the effect of the new circular policy.

The minister, Schouten, wants an end to the legislation that is holding back circular agriculture, but her vision for livestock farming is less radical than De Boer’s. Whereas De Boer is aiming to minimize the use of animal feed that is also suitable for human consumption, the minister mainly wants livestock farmers and arable farmers to collaborate in closing the cycle.

Animal feed nearby

Livestock farmers should supply manure to the arable farmers, who in turn provide animal feed to the livestock farmers. That animal feed should be grown nearby and replace imports of soya from Brazil, is the idea. The manure should also be supplied to nearby farms.

A point for discussion is the geographical extent of the closed-cycle chains: are we talking about local, regional or international closed cycles? That still has to be worked out in specific policies. Take animal feed. At present it is cheaper for livestock farmers to buy imported soya meal from Brazil than animal feed from a local arable farm, says Oene Oenema, professor by special appointment in Nutrient Management. If we replace those imports with Dutch soya, and maize and cereals from north-west Europe, feed prices will increase.

The cultivation of Dutch soya will also have consequences for arable farming. ‘Maize and soya are useful feed crops but you don’t want them taking up half of the Netherlands,’ says Oenema. There is another complicating factor too, says the professor. Dutch animal feed imports don’t just consist of rainforest-destroying soya, as is often thought.

Orange peel and palm kernels

‘Our feed manufacturers are very smart and scour the global market to produce good, cheap animal feed,’ says Oenema. ‘They use over 20 different waste products such as orange peel and palm kernels, which they turn into high-quality animal feed. That is a circular economy but on a global scale. What do we plan to do with that?’

A real pain in the neck

Then there is the manure, currently a real pain in the neck for Dutch livestock farming. In circular agriculture, all manure has to be turned into high-grade raw material for pastures and arable farming — but how? At the moment, a quarter of all manure produced in the Netherlands is exported to surrounding countries, says Oenema. ‘If the Netherlands stops exporting manure, we would have to reduce the livestock population by a quarter in order to avoid having a manure surplus.’

But this story is somewhat more complicated too. Dutch farmers currently use synthetic fertilizers as well. The new circular vision requires a reduction in the use of synthetic fertilizers so that farming uses fewer raw materials. That would lead to an increase in the demand for animal manure in the next few years, which could create room for more livestock after all, predicts Oenema.

These positive and negative factors determine the eventual ‘room for manure’. The rule here is that all the manure should end up in the place where the animal feed is produced — in order to close the cycle. But do arable farmers want that manure?

Tailored nutrients

Oenema says livestock farmers should separate their manure out into a solid fraction — with phosphate and fibres — and a liquid fraction— with nitrogen and potassium. The professor expects this will let them deliver nutrients tailored to meet arable farmers’ needs, which will make the manure valuable.

Wageningen’s experimental farm De Marke is trying out a number of these circular principles. De Marke is a dairy farm that produces its own animal feed. Manure and minerals are used as efficiently as possible so that the requirements for raw materials and energy are as low as possible. The farm stopped using synthetic phosphate fertilizer in 1993 and barely uses synthetic nitrogen fertilizer anymore. The cows eat a lot of silage and little concentrate, so the farm’s ammonia emissions are low.

Good soil

De Marke offers one form of circular agriculture for dairy farming but the circular approach has to apply to arable farming too. Good soil is fundamental for circular agriculture, states the minister in her vision. Soil quality affects not just crop production but the climate too.

Good soil contains a lot of organic matter, explains Lijbert Brussaard, emeritus professor of Soil Biology at Wageningen. After all, soil with a lot of organic matter is able to absorb water and cope much better with drought. He quotes approvingly from the minister’s circular vision: ‘Such a soil can also hold more nitrogen and minerals; it sustains a richer soil life and helps produce healthy crops’. Farmers can help reduce CO₂ emissions by fixing carbon in the soil ‘Aged manure with straw is much better for the soil’ in the form of organic matter, he explains.

Less ploughing

Ploughing less is an important measure because ploughing causes carbon compounds in the soil to come into contact with oxygen, resulting in the creation of CO₂. The more climate-friendly alternative is called non-inversion tillage. Furthermore, carbon is fixed by growing crops with deep roots, such as cereals, rather than crops that put out shallow roots, such as potatoes, so farmers have to take that into account in their cultivation plans. Brussaard also sets requirements for the quality of the manure. ‘Slurry is not good enough; aged manure with straw is much better for the soil.’

At the Agroecology and Technology Test Location in Lelystad, WUR is working on the arable farming approach sketched by Brussaard. The experimental farm stopped ploughing nine years ago and aims to ‘use ecology’s regulating capacity in agriculture,’ as researcher Wijnand Sukkel puts it. By practicing shallow tillage or not ploughing at all, they have increased the organic matter content of the soil considerably.

Strip cultivation

This year, the farm started strip cultivation with potatoes, sugar beets, a mix of grass and clover, carrots, wheat, flowers and onions. In principle, the application of stripcropping should result in fewer diseases and pests because there are more natural enemies of the pests on the plot than in a monoculture.

Biodiversity and soil quality are the points of departure for this nature-inclusive experimental farm that was officially opened as a test location in September. It can provide the building blocks for the new circular policy.

Opportunities and obstacles

Circular agriculture has actually been practiced for a long time on individual farms. Frank Verhoeven, who advises farmers through his company Boerenverstand, knows of around 150 Dutch farmers who apply circular principles on their farm. Those farmers have a hard time, says Verhoeven, because current agricultural policy stands in the way of circular farmers. Like Scholten, Verhoeven also talked last summer to the coalition parties and the minister about both the obstacles to circular farming and the opportunities.

The dominant course of producing as much as possible as cheaply as possible for the global market has left its mark on policy, says the alumnus, who graduated in Animal Sciences in Wageningen 20 years ago. ‘What is more, regulations primarily focus on parts of the system,’ he says, quoting from the  circular vision document. For example, in the policy on the environment, sustainability is interpreted as minimizing the environmental damage per kilo of meat, litre of milk or kilo of potatoes, which makes intensive production appear the best solution.

Low-input dairy farmers

Circular farmers on the other hand aim to minimize the use of raw materials for their farm. They interpret sustainability as low environmental damage per hectare. These are low-input dairy farmers, says Verhoeven, who use little or no synthetic fertilizer and concentrates, and mainly use their own grass as animal feed. They produce as much milk as intensive farmers, but with one more cow.

However, the ammonia and phosphate laws put limits on the number of cows. Under that legislation, farmers who produce as much milk per cow as possible have an advantage. What is more, policy rules form an obstacle to ageing manure and using it to improve soil fertility.

Slurry

The Use of Fertilizer Decree states that farmers have to inject slurry into the soil whereas circular farmers prefer to spread manure on top of the soil. The Low Ammonia Emission Animal Housing Systems Decree says cows should be kept in closed barns to minimize emissions of ammonia and greenhouse gases, whereas circular farmers want to compost their manure.

Bieslandhoeve in Delfgauw, where the minister presented her circular vision, is an open straw barn where the manure is composted. ‘That is the ideal barn for both soil and cows, but the ministry assigns this barn system the highest emissions factor, so no farmer will want to build one,’ explains Verhoeven.

The minister wants to remove obstacles but she does not yet have any concrete legislation. She does promise in her vision that she will give ‘the pioneers strong support from now on for the innovations, experiments and investments in a closed cycle that they have already made in the past few years.’

Race to the bottom

But policy alone is not enough; circular farmers also need a business model. If the current economic system does not change, food production looks set to remain a race to the bottom, with low prices and food wastage.

We therefore need to encourage the circular approach through higher prices, thinks Wageningen economist Krijn Poppe. ‘Current prices are not a good indicator for what we are doing. At present, nobody pays the bill for depleting global phosphate stocks or for producing waste and greenhouse gases. If you let businesses and consumers pay the real costs, you will automatically end up with optimum closed cycles. That debate about local or global closed cycles will be resolved automatically.’

Mineral cycle

You could for example increase the value of manure with new rules, says Poppe. He suggests that livestock farms could introduce a money-back system for the minerals in the animal feed. Farmers who buy this feed should be able to deliver the manure from the cows that ate the feed to the animal feed factory and get money back. The economist thinks that would close the mineral cycle between animal feed producers and farmers.

Kipster founder and agricultural economist Ruud Zanders thinks people overly complicate the business model for circular farming. ‘It’s very simple. You calculate the unit cost, add a margin and you get the sale price. Then you go to a potential customer with your story and ask them whether they want to buy at this price. Our first step was to arrange the contract with Lidl; without that sale contract, we wouldn’t have started.’

115 milion tons of waste

Kipster will be taking the same approach for a planned second location in the Netherlands and one in Belgium for the production of eggs — first sort out the sales, then the licences, then build the farms. He will be sticking to the circular concept. ‘The European food industry produces around 115 million tons of waste annually. At the moment, only 4 to 5 million tons are used for animal feed. There is still lots of potential there.’

www.wur.eu/circularfood

Background image: Shutterstock

Delicia has been making chocolate sprinkles for years for nearly all the supermarkets’ own brands, each with their own recipe. ‘We have been wor king on alternatives to sugar in sprinkles for a long time, but of course we have to do that in consultation with our clients,’ says Lok. ‘Sooner or later, whether voluntarily or through legislation, we’ll all be using less sugar and we want to prepare for that. And of course, the sprinkles must still be delicious.’

Wageningen expert

Delicia received advice from Wageningen University & Research on how to adapt the production process. The chocolate sprinkles producer was one of the 10 small to medium enterprises invited by the ministry of Public Health and Sport to spend a day with a Wageningen expert exploring the options for reducing or replacing sugar.

Consuming too much sugar

This service came out of a 2014 agreement on improving the composition of products between the ministry of Public Health and the food industry. Companies drew up plans for reducing sugar, saturated fat and salt, with the aim of creating a healthier range of products. Most people in the western world consume too much sugar, fat and salt, with obesity and diabetes as the most widespread harmful consequences.

The industry’s plans for sugar reduction are being tested by a scientific advisory committee. ‘What is coming out of that is that, with a few exceptions, the ambitions are too low,’ says Joost Blankestijn, programme manager at Wageningen Food & Biobased Research. Cutting down is not easy, he explains. One of the problems is that consumers have to get used to ‘light’ or ‘zero’ products.

Small steps

‘So producers will have to reduce the amount of sugar in sweets and baked goods such as cookies and cakes in small steps, so that consumers actually don’t notice,’ says Blankestijn. And preferably, all companies should join in, so that consumers can’t switch to a cookie, cake or brand of sprinkles made by a producer that hasn’t started cutting down on sugar. Cutting down in stages eventually results in a drastic change in taste, but people get used to that, as anyone knows who has accidentally been given a cup of coffee with sugar and is disgusted, whereas there was once a time when they wouldn’t have done without that sugar lump.

The findings of Wageningen Food & Biobased Research at Peijnenburg led to a ‘white paper’ earlier this year, which outlined a sugar reduction strategy. ‘In it we describe how we can offer companies fast and effective combinations of sugar substitutes,’ says Blankestijn. ‘They can read in the report what the impact of a sugar substitute would be on the structure, texture and flavour of their product.’

At the Federation of the Dutch Food Industry (FNLI), food and health manager Christine Grit is pleased with Wageningen’s advice to the federation’s 20 small and medium-sized enterprises. ‘Businesses need help with cutting down on sugar without affecting the quality of their product,’ says Grit.

Calories

‘Producers who have less in-house expertise have particular difficulty with the dilemmas they face. If you reduce sugar, for instance, and thereby increase the amount of starch in the product, you add calories. The same goes for fat as a sugar substitute.’

And then there are the legal implications of replacing sugar with an alternative sweetener such as xylitol. ‘There has to be a warning on the label because of the possible laxative effect,’ says Grit.

The ministry of Public Health and Sport is extending the subsidized advisory service due to its success. Fifteen new companies are currently being selected. ‘This time we shall not only visit them but also invite them to come to Wageningen in January for a workshop in our bakery facility. We’ll demonstrate all kinds of possibilities, such as cake with no added sugar,’ says Joost Blankestijn.

Far too sweet

‘We are also challenging ingredient suppliers to come and demonstrate their solutions here. And we are going to help the sector to raise the quality of the plans for improving product composition.’ Blankestijn wants to apply the sugar reduction strategy to dairy products too. ‘Milkbased desserts are far too sweet. There is much to be gained there.’

At Delicia in Tilburg, Gertjan Lok had already studied the option of substituting the alternative sweetener maltitol for refined granulated sugar. ‘Just like xylitol, it is a bit of a laxative. But for technical reasons too, we could only replace a relatively small proportion of the sugar with it,’ he explains during a guided tour of the factory. Lok praises the Wageningen expert who spent a day at the factory going over the technical ins and outs of sugar reduction.

‘We came to the conclusion that it is better to reduce the amount of conventional sugar little by little,’ says Lok. ‘Clients and consumers can slowly get used to it, and we can try out small adjustments to the production process to support that reduction.’ Delicia can now produce chocolate sprinkles with 20 to 30 per cent less sugar. ‘The main way we did that was by replacing sugar with cocoa. We haven’t yet looked into whether we  can reduce the sugar even more.’

The product is more expensive, notes the company, as was the case at Peijnenburg. But Lok is undeterred. ‘If customers don’t want to pay for it, we as the producer will have to make the first move, even if our profit margin falls during the introduction phase. In the end, our customers will cooperate in getting healthier sprinkles into the shops,’ he says.

Creamier

That is the company’s philosophy. At an earlier stage, this small enterprise decided to use only UTZcertified cocoa (guaranteeing sustainable farming and production) in its sprinkles. The representatives of the Tilburg company now bring its clients a sample of its sprinkles with less sugar and more cocoa, in the hope that they will opt for this alternative. The low-sugar sprinkles look darker. And, although no chocolate sprinkles connoisseur, I thought it was tastier and creamier than the original.

http://www.wur.eu/sugarreduction

Background image: Shutterstock

‘Taking part in the Challenge really took up an awful lot of time,’ says Verweij. Zhang: ‘It is evening and weekend work, and it is a real commitment. It’s not just an odd job you can easily fit in on the side.’ Lotje Hogerzeil (25), a Master’s student of Urban Systems Engineering, kept a blog about her participation in the Challenge. ‘I don’t think I – or the whole Evergreen team – have ever worked so hard on a project.’

Blood, sweat and tears

On 25 July, after nearly seven months of beavering away, her team submitted their design at four o’clock in the morning. ‘All the papers I wrote, the exams I took, even the designs I made previously for courses: none of them came close to the blood, sweat and tears we shed to get this done.’

Motivation

In their degree programmes, students get study credit points in the ECTS system, with one credit equivalent to 28 hours of work. But the Challenge participants did not get credits for their participation. Strange, in Verweij’s view, given how much time participants put into it. ‘You could get something in return for that.’ At the same time, she adds, perhaps the strength of the Challenge lies precisely in the fact that it is not a course. ‘You don’t get chased up by a teacher. You have to find the motivation in yourself and your team.’

Professor of Education and Competency Studies Perry den Brok is adamant that the Challenge must not be made into a course. ‘As soon as you formalize it, by allocating study credits to it for instance, the creative aspect and the intrinsic motivation are lost.’ But the education programme could benefit from some parts of the Challenge, thinks Den Brok. ‘If you build a mini-Challenge into a foundation course, for instance, it might make it nicer and stretch students more .’

Step outside the academic world

GreenWURks member Yaoyun Zhang is a Master’s student of Organic Agriculture. He wants to use the knowledge and skills he is acquiring in Wageningen back in China later on. ‘While I am studying here, I am trying to learn as much as I can about urban farming projects in Europe. The Challenge gave me an opportunity to explore how I can apply what I study in the real world. You step outside the academic world for a while and look at how to go about it in practice.’

In that respect, the Greenhouse Challenge opened a lot of doors, says Verweij. ‘We got access to a lot of places and people within the world of urban farming. That gives you a nice picture of the possibilities and the developments within that sector.’ The team’s victory feels like a reward, says Verweij. ‘We all worked unbelievably hard on Open Bajes. That makes the moment when the jury says, “You’ve won” really cool.’

Greenhouse in China

There are five more Greenhouse Challenges on the agenda for the coming 10 years. The next one will take place in China in 2020. Zhang already has a tip for the participants. ‘People in big Chinese cities have a lot of stress from working hard. They’ve lost their connection with nature. The urban greenhouse is needed in China to change that.’

www.wur.eu/studentchallenges

Background image: AM, Robota, OMA, FABRICations

Birdwatching

With this ideal in mind, the brothers launched their now successful business and booking platform Nature.house (starting with a Dutch website, Natuurhuisje.nl) back in 2009. ‘I was studying in Wageningen and my brother and I wanted to go birdwatching in the Extremadura region of western Spain. I searched and searched for a quiet house where we could do our own thing undisturbed, but all I could find was bungalows in those kinds of holiday parks.’

After graduating in 2013, Tim van Oerle and his brother got down to serious business – true to form, in an attic. Not on the Hoogstraat in Wageningen, though, but in their parental home with its patch of forest near Breda. ‘Originally, our concept, Natuurhuisje.nl, involved offering people renting out accommodation an annual subscription,’ he explains. ‘That meant people could rent out a house in a natural setting through our site. They got the rent and we got an annual fee.’

Startlife bureau

In the early days of their business they received support from the Startlife bureau in Wageningen. Startlife aims to promote entrepreneurship and help people turn innovative ideas into sustainable businesses. ‘We also got an interest-free startup loan of 10,000 euros from Startlife. And there was absolutely no hurry to pay it back. Startlife also forced us to put our ideas into a business plan,’ says Van Oerle.

He has good memories of the drinks and meals he had with other Startlife participants. After a year, the brothers changed their business model, partly as a result of critical discussions Tim had in that period with the then KLV director Paul Besten, who was involved in Startlife. ‘We switched from an annual subscription to a “no cure no pay” system. Just like a website like Booking.com, we get a fee from the property owner for  every booking made on Nature.house.com. Ten per cent of the rent (excluding VAT) of the holiday home comes to us.’

It is no longer just a case of holiday houses and bungalows, though. If you look on www.Nature.house, you’ll also see a variety of glamping options, yurts and gypsy caravans, all ‘in the most beautiful nature and often in undiscovered spots,’ as the website says.

Chat

‘To give people the nice feeling of having a complete getaway from the hustle and bustle of their daily lives,’ is how Tim van Oerle sees his mission. And, he adds, ‘above all, I want them to see how lovely nature can be. We want to bring people closer to nature.’

The brothers aim to create a community around Nature.house as well. ‘Through a chat system, for instance, to improve communication between owners and guests. Also through the reviews that guests can write, like on Airbnb, including criticisms or points for improvement. Owners can respond to reviews and can also answer guests’ questions in advance, so they know what the facilities will be like.’

Nature.house has really taken off. In 2017 the platform handled 20 million euros’ worth of transactions. By October this year, the Van Oerles had seen the 60,000th booking. They now have 18 people working for them. ‘It seems we’re not the only ones who can’t stand holiday parks,’ jokes Tim.

Success

‘I really believe nature is far more popular among a broad section of the population than politicians realize. Nor can the success entirely be put down to the fact that people want to get away more often, and closer to home, now that they have more money to spare,’ he adds. ‘When we started, the economic crisis was still going on, and even then we grew rapidly, against the market trends.’

Busy over 45s

The majority of guests are busy over-45s, but there are a growing number of young people too. ‘At first we mainly attracted birdwatchers and people looking for peace and quiet, but we now we get renters across the board who need a break from the stress of their hectic lives.’

Van Oerle is alert to the need to preserve the principles of the concept, and to make improvements where possible. The criteria the brothers use for ‘nature houses’ are simple. ‘They can’t be in a large holiday park, and the park mustn’t have a swimming pool and a reception, or more than 20 houses. Because we want it to be far from the hurly-burly, the accommodation can’t be in a town or village, or near motorways or the railway,’ he says. Houses that do not meet the criteria are turned down.

Spreading wings across Europe

Meanwhile, the brothers have launched their English-language website and spread their wings across Europe. More than a quarter of their 8000 houses are in the Netherlands. There are 1000 in Belgium and 2000 in France — in both countries most of the owners are Dutch or Belgian. But the brothers are beginning to get a foothold in Germany and Scandinavia too.

Sustainability principles

Nature.house is now honing its sustainability principles. ‘We plant a tree for every night booked. So this year we will have planted 120,000 trees in the damaged mangrove swamps of Madagascar. We have been there to see how the foresters are going about it. And we may support afforestation projects in Spain and Portugal as well.’ 

nature.house

Background image: Bram Belloni

‘If there is widespread hunger and undernutrition in a country, people start thinking that’s normal, or a “curse”. But it is neither. Hunger and undernutrition result from decisions and choices about the use of scarce resources. But you can make other choices too.’

Promote food security

Haddad, winner of the prestigious American World Food Prize in 2018, was one of the keynote speakers at the international conference Towards Zero Hunger: Partnerships for impact, where 600 policymakers, entrepreneurs and NGOs gathered in Wageningen at the initiative of the centenarian university. They agreed on new collaborative efforts to banish hunger and promote food security and sustainable agriculture.

‘The media, civil society organizations, you and I, we must all keep on raising this issue,’ argued Haddad. ‘We must provide the facts about the scale and the consequences of hunger and undernutrition. And we must help governments and business to combat hunger effectively.’

Vulnerable groups

Haddad’s organization GAIN is already working on this. GAIN brings governments, businesses and civil society organizations together in alliances against undernutrition. The organization is running 10 programmes in Asia and Africa that aim to get more healthy food to the most vulnerable groups, and it does research on which approach works best.

According to Cousin, only joint action has any chance of success. ‘You need all parties in sustainable development: the local community, local and national government bodies, international organizations, companies, scientists and the development NGOs.’ She sees a nice example in Rwanda. ‘DSM started a factory there producing highly nutritious food for children based on maize, and working with the government, donors – the Netherlands among them – and an association of 10,000 small farmers who grow maize. With that kind of concerted action you can achieve a win-win situation. DSM is getting a bigger turnover, the farmers are assured of a market, and the children get helthy food.’

look differently at profitability

Several big companies were represented at the Wageningen conference, including dairy company FrieslandCampina and beer producer Heineken. They seek more and more collaboration with knowledge institutes and universities. In his keynote speech, Unilever CEO Paul Polman explained that companies will have to look differently at profitability and collaborative relationships with government and NGOs.

‘Nowadays, waste and pollution are often more costly than sustainable development. Deforestation and climate change are more expensive than the sustainable alternatives for food production. This creates a market for sustainable development. It is already the case that sustainable food production is Unilever’s main source of income. We buy more and more products from small farmers for a fair price, and we work with local partners,’ says Polman.

International coalitions

‘But Unilever can’t make palm oil production sustainable on its own; you need international coalitions to do that. The decisive factor is whether the financial sector wants to invest in this. Investors should put their money into companies that use natural resources sustainably. And regional development banks should concentrate on covering the backs of companies that invest in sustainable development, instead of financing development projects themselves.’

http://www.wur.eu/zerohunger

Background image: Alamy

Why don’t we make efforts to ensure that all the farmers get this kind of modern soil map? In combination with models for simulating the water and nutrient dynamics, the farmer would then be able to respond to his crop’s needs in good time.

He wouldn’t have to wait until the plants go all limp, but would know in time that the nutrients are running out. Plus, he can avoid over-fertilizing and therefore polluting groundwater and surface water. This would be a significant soil science contribution to precision agriculture, and to circular agriculture. And what is more, we would be making an immediate, real contribution to the development goals.’

Jacobs’ client was Conservation South Africa (CSA), an NGO whose aim is for nature conservation and development to go hand in hand. The training courses are funded by Nuffic, the Dutch organization for internationalization in education. CSA wants to reinforce the farmer organizations so they can contribute to the quality of their members’ livestock through measures such as joint purchasing, veterinary care, rotation grazing and organizing markets.

Different regions

‘Our training courses focused on teaching farmer organizations in three different regions to organize themselves better, tackle problems they had in common, and solve conflicts,’ says Jacobs. ‘The circumstances vary from region to region. In Namakwa District the main issue is independence from middlemen. In Mzimvubu Catchment, reliable weighing scales are a hot topic. We dealt with those differences in our training courses so the participants could draw up action plans that were applicable in their regions.’

Info: judith.jacobs@wur.nl

Background image: Alamy