In October 2020, Hoogendoorn Growth Management introduced their new showpiece: the IIVO. "It was in the middle of the pandemic, after ten years of development," says sales manager Kevin Spoelder.
Winning the Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge in 2020 coincided with GreenTech that year, a good time to present the new climate computer. However, for reasons now generally known, the exhibition was canceled and the presentation of the IIVO, via an online launch event, was postponed for a few months.
Now, a year has gone by and more than 100 copies of the IIVO have been delivered. "We are very proud of that." But where does that demand come from? What is so different about the IIVO compared to previous climate computers?
Kevin explains: "If you look at industrial automation, solidity and reliability are very important. Of course, those are indeed very important, but the customer experience has also changed enormously over the last fifteen years, since the arrival of the first iPhone. Our predecessor, the iSii, dates from the same period. Users now have much higher demands for technology."
Built from scratch
For this reason, Hoogendoorn built the system from scratch. "That way, we are ready for the next fifteen years." The 'look' of the new computer, as Kevin describes it, is contemporary. The product really feels like a modern piece of technology, comparable to the latest phones and tablets.
'Under the hood', too, they were able to rebuild everything. "This allowed us to take into account new developments in the market, such as data-driven cultivation. We were also able to build in communication with all kinds of new platforms and sensors; for example, you can put cultivation strategies into the system from LetsGrow.com." In addition, the system can be updated completely online, without the need for someone to physically visit a farm.
The system can be used for all sorts of crops: from tomatoes to orchids, from peppers to lettuce. What helps here is that you can run your own 'cultivation recipes' on the computer. "From day 0 in cultivating, you can prepare all kinds of settings in succession for water, climate, energy, and so on. The computer runs this cycle automatically, and when it is finished, you can start the process again. In this way, you build up a library of settings."
The principles of Plant Empowerment, whereby the plant remains in balance, are also 'baked into' the system. Kevin: "The plant balances are also made transparent in the system. This can be done, for example, via an RTR graph - the ratio between temperature and radiation. In this way, you can set the required temperature on the basis of the weather forecast, which is why the weather forecast is also integrated into the system's controls."
For more information:
Kevin Spoelder 
Hoogendoorn Growth Management
Westlandseweg 190
3131 HX Vlaardingen
+31 10 460 80 80
ks@hoogendoorn.nl
www.hoogendoorn.nl