TURKISH AGRI.NEWS

Feeding the 11 billion: Wageningen, the small Dutch town ending our food crisis... Describing itself as the primary knowledge-intensive agrifood ecosystem in the Netherlands, Food Valley, as it's known, promises food-related solutions "in the region and far beyond", via co-operation between companies, knowledge institutions, innovation centres, education and government. The base for these global ambitions is the quiet university town of Wageningen. This is a modest place, seemingly at odds with its reputation as a world capital of innovation in food and agriculture, where the whole chain of research is usually covered in-house – by the locality's more than 6,500 specialists and experts, from biochemical engineers to seaweed policy makers to tasting panellists who determine the deliciousness of experimental tomatoes. Wageningen, an hour's drive from Amsterdam, was nicknamed Food Valley (referencing the Gelderse Valley, where the town nestles) in the early 2000s....

Farmers in South-America have been growing quinoa for thousands of years. In the Netherlands the crop is cultivated on a commercial scale only since April 2014. Since it is such a new crop, Dutch Quinoa Group could set up a local value chain from scratch. Therefore, it is sustainable in every sense. Rens Kuijten has been interested in quinoa for a long time. After several years of research Kuijten and his business partner founded Dutch Quinoa Group in 2014. Now he is one of the directors of the company. Dutch Quinoa Group, a Foodvalley Member, supplies quinoa as an ingredient to the food industry, and quinoa products to retail and catering industry. “In April 2014, the first farmers in the Netherlands sowed quinoa,” Kuijten remembers. “We wanted to gain experience in growing and process the crop successfully. One of our main concerns was security of supply. That is why we dedicated the first two years to resolving technical issues, and organizing the value chain; from grower and ...

Can Japan Model its Agriculture on the Netherlands? The Netherlands has made active use of IT and AI to boost the value of its agricultural exports, becoming the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products after the United States. The Abe administration is seeking structural reform of Japan’s agricultural sector based on the Dutch model, but could there be some blind spots in that pursuit? Here I consider what Japan should learn from the Dutch, drawing on my own observations from a visit to the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the traditional rural landscape of windmills and tulips is giving way to wind power generation equipment and high-tech glasshouses. The marrow of the Netherlands' agricultural policy is a strong R&D setup grounded in cooperation among business, knowledge institutions, and government bodies. In 1997, a business-knowledge-government cluster built around the University of Wageningen some 90 kilometers east of the capital Amsterdam was dubb...