Agricultural automation is a big promise. It allows us to farm with less people and smaller machines, hopefully within the boundaries of nature. At the same time it is not easy. A farming field is a chaotic environment, that is also dirty. The 2 things that robotic automation has most difficulty to deal with. This presentation will give insights into the results and struggles of the 2023 weeding season. Where Trabotyx weeded 5HA+ of carrots field, removed over 250.000 weeds, got our first paying customer and a big learning curve on the technical and operational side. Dust gets everywhere!
 | 4 December 2024 |  |
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A presentation by Tim Kreukniet, Co-founder / CEO at Trabotyx.
About Tim Kreukniet
Tim Kreukniet has an extensive background in Clean and Deeptech. After a 10 year career in electric vehicles in the Netherlands and the US, Tim switched to innovation in Agriculture. If you want to minimize climate change, you have to create healthy ecosystems. In 2020, together with Mohamed Boussama, Tim co-founded Trabotyx to automate manual weeding for organic agriculture.
He enjoys it the most, when things are still not really working and a little bit unclear. You have to work together to come to good solutions!
On the short run he thinks that science around microbes and understanding what is healthy and what is not, will hopefully change our relation with food, to make sure we eat more healthy food that does not have a negative impact on ecosystems.
On the long run however he is afraid that our global meat consumption will continue to rise and that the cultural shift is a too big ask, so he hopes lab grown meat becomes a viable solution.
About Trabotyx
Trabotyx automates the manual weeding proces in organic agriculture. We specialize in taking out individual weeds close to the plant. Hereby making life easier for the organic farmers and boosting their bottom line. For more information go to the website.
Trab is the Tunisian word for soil. Our motivation for this is simple; as we are talking to more farmers, we are learning more and more about the importance of soil. Good soil creates healthy food, is resistant to weather events and supports all life on earth.
We want to apply the progress in machine learning and robotics to the field of agriculture with 3 specific goals:
- improve the profitability of farmers,
- increase biodiversity
- restore soil.
Tim Kreukniet will speak at the 2023 edition of the Agrifood Innovation Event in the Smart Farming Farming session.