Internship experiences Yannick Smedts

During my graduation internship, together with my fellow student Stijn Vermazeren, we worked on two different assignments; a question from Jacob was, make my website more attractive, more beautiful and more high-tech, the other question was, is it possible to also use the soil scanner outside arable farming. The website has been overhauled, as everyone knows the site now (5-01-2016) it has been designed and filled. Hours and days is the content, the photos and links have been transferred. We shared a lot of information about this with Jacob. The advantage of designing and filling in an entire website is that we have not focused on a specific point in precision agriculture, but have gone through the entire cycle. We continued to receive explanations from Jacob and exchanged ideas about insights into precision agriculture.

In addition, the EM38-mk2 soil scanner has been deployed in several sectors. Stijn and I are from the tree nursery sector ourselves. That is why we approached a number of tree growers to map the soil variation within the framework of precision tree cultivation. The tree growers Fleuren and Mart van Dijk are now ambassadors in the precision arboriculture sector. Soil scans were also carried out at the Prize 'd eau golf course in Tilburg. Prize 'd eau is maintained by the ENK, the ENK strives for progress. Autonomous lawn mowers have been driving around on the golf course for several years. During our project, a number of golf courses were mapped with the soil scanner. The combination with the Fritzmeier Isaria crop sensor has also been sought. The aim was to improve the golf course to achieve maximum playability.

During this 20-week internship, Stijn and I got a very good picture of the vision and way of working at Van den Borne potatoes. We have discussed the precision agricultural cycle and why it has been set up in this way repeatedly. To this day I am still engaged in precision agriculture in arboriculture, I still have contact with Jacob.