Thomas Pleeging

Lead UX Designer at Source.ag

Talk

Growing more fruits and vegetables by giving growers AI superpowers

Have you ever tried to grow tomatoes at home, maybe on the balcony with kids? And after a whole summer, you have just enough for one small meal? And realizing how hard it is, you go to the supermarket where there are fruit and vegetables year round?

For 3 billion people in the world, this is not the case: they do not have access to sufficient fresh fruit and vegetables. This is not just in developing countries: also in Europe and the US, there are food deserts. 

Greenhouses, like those in NL, have 5 to 20 times higher yield, use up to 95% less water and up to 70% less nutrients compared to open field farming. However, to increase greenhouse vegetable production worldwide, there is a bottleneck: skilled growers. There are just not enough of them. 

At Source.ag we built a suite of AI powered products (by the way, we really build them, it's not an LLM wrapper) to empower growers to grow more fruit and vegetables without breaking planetary boundaries. Our grower co-pilot is used every day by growers in 20 countries, managing over 2000 hectares of greenhouses.

About

Thomas Pleeging is lead UX designer at Source.ag. Before that, he worked at various startups and Total Design as UX designer.