Cooperatives are fundamental organizations in small holder agriculture in developing countries. With the rising and immeasurable climate change effects in such economies, cooperatives urgently need to compete as more ecologically as compared to their current economic and social targets. With the deteriorating …

Organic farming is increasingly promoted as a means to reduce the environmental impact of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics in conventional dairy systems. These factors potentially affect the microbial communities of the production stages (soil, silage, dung, and milk) of …

In Eastern Africa, increasing climate variability and changing socioeconomic conditions are exacerbating the frequency and intensity of drought disasters. Droughts pose a severe threat to food security in this region, which is characterized by a large dependency on smallholder rain-fed agriculture and …

Our planet’s ecology and society are on a collision course, which manifests due to a contradiction in the assumptions of unlimited material growth fueling the linear economic paradigm. Our closed planetary ecosystem imposes confined amounts of space and a finite extent of resources upon its inhabitants. …

Using the latest industrial robot technology, the collaborative robot (cobot), industrial manufacturers work towards high-mix low-volume production systems that could satisfy a diversifying customer demand. As the utilization of the cobot’s potential depends on the dynamic interaction with operators, …

India is facing issues with the availability of vegetables and with water quality and availability especially in Maharashtra where the availability of water depends on the season. Drought years can have a severe impact on the agriculture production. The polyhouse can be a solution to increase the production …

Animal welfare is a multidimensional phenomenon and currently its on-farm assessment requires complex, multidimensional frameworks involving farm audits which are time-consuming, infrequent and expensive. The core principle of precision agriculture is to use sensor technologies to improve the efficiency …

This thesis project has been carried out at VHL (Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences) and consists of three different parts; the first part is an experiment in which during 20 days of cultivation the optimum nitrate concentration for protein production in Ulva lactuca is sought. U. lactuca …

Fungal contaminations cause problems in different industries worldwide. One of these is the production of entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs) which are used as biological pesticides. How these contaminations occur is often unclear. Because the production and formulation process is done partly in the open …