02-07-2025
As CEO of Harvest House, Jelte van Kammen is a connecting force in the sector. "I bring people together and inspire them. Moreover, I seem to have the talent to see where a development is going. I try to convey that to others.''
'We need to take action ourselves'
Why is connection in the sector so important?
"The entire greenhouse cluster faces the same challenges. Then it makes much more sense to work together on solutions. We are more like-minded than you might think and working together then can only have advantages. Ten years ago, we started working together as fruit vegetable organisations in the FVO (see box) on non-competitive topics. In the last three years, we have made huge strides for the greenhouse vegetable sector."
What accelerated this?
"That was partly due to a group we started calling the Coalition of the Willing. A think tank with people from the entire high-tech greenhouse cluster: from vegetable producers to ornamental growers and from breeders to suppliers. We signalled that something really had to change in certain areas if we wanted to keep our licence to produce. Instead of waiting, lobbying and trying to delay laws, we realised: if we want change, we have to do it ourselves. So we set to work together. We identified what the real, urgent issues are, our burning platforms, and we focused on those.
At the FVO, we try to find practical solutions. As producers, we are now taking the lead and together with the whole cluster, we are working to make real changes. For example, with synthetic crop protection. The medicine cabinet was getting empty, but we kept asking politicians for help. That lobby is not going to help us. We have to change ourselves. And if you ask growers now, they all see and want us to change."
How is the FVO working on solutions?
"The FVO's project approach focuses on the grower: they can put pilots into practice. For the crop protection theme, we think about solutions cluster-wide, with suppliers and chain partners. In practical pilots at FVO growers' greenhouses, we can test what really works. We do the same for themes such as energy, biodiversity, water and labour. It is always about cooperation and doing."
Harvest House is often at the forefront of innovation. Where does that come from?
"It's in the character of our growers. They are all future-oriented entrepreneurs, whose decisiveness sets the pace for our organisation. Not talking for too long, but discussing and then doing. Take the HortiFootprint, the forerunner of the FreshProducePEFCR, which was introduced by one of our growers. I believe in making our environmental impact measurable. That's why at Harvest House we pulled hard on the first pilots. Then we took it wider in the sector. The same applies to the True Value project. We don't wait, we actively help build the future.
The real value of salads cultivation
In the FVO project True Value, we are comparing the costs and benefits for climate, biodiversity and social sustainability. In doing so, we determine the environmental prices of our sector, collect innovations that contribute to a lower impact and list the relevant utility services. Think of grid balancing, water storage, water purification, health and land use. In cooperation with expert parties, we convert data into costs and benefits using a standardised methodology.