Thanks to technology advancements, the farm sector is reaping the rewards of effective software. Across the world’s fertile areas, crops are sown, fields are managed, and harvests are gathered using precise data and automated workflows – and productivity has rocketed. Just 50 years ago, one farmer’s work fed 25 people. Today that figure is 150[1].
But few realize technology also plays a role where the fields are smaller and the products less mass-market: horticulture.
Horticulture – a subset of agriculture – is traditionally both art and science, cultivating edible and ornamental plants at smaller scales and in narrower niches. Rather than endless fields of green and yellow, its home territory is gardens and nurseries, often owned by families rather than global corporations. And its products celebrate diversity not monoculture, with small producers famed for local specialties and varietals.
But the business drivers of horticulture – greater productivity, higher yields, improved health and quality – are the same as in the broader agricultural sector.
You might think IT – from greenhouse management software to horticulture technology – would return less value in this space. After all, software and automation work best at scale, performing set tasks, in high volumes, consistently and repeatedly. But as you’ll see, horticulture software is, if anything, more useful in specialized markets than in mass agriculture.
Let’s look at the reasons.
What Makes Modern Horticulture So Complex? Think Rainforest, not Field
While some horticulture thrives outdoors, many of the highest value-adds – exotic plants, rare varietals, luxury ingredients – are grown in closed spaces, known as Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA). Many of these plants would never grow in the local climate outside – they’re often hard to farm even in their home climates. (Japanese wasabi being a key example.)
This matters, because a greenhouse is more complex than an open field. And the plants inside need specialized care. (Among vegetable suppliers, one row may contain artisan arugula and its neighbour exotic pak choi; in flower growing, orchids may share glass acreage with ferns.) And the methods of growing can be complex, too: misting sprays rather than buckets of water, precise fertilizer injection rather than a man with a shovel. To provide the data, climate control systems, automatic irrigation systems, and arrays of sensors are packed into every greenhouse and grow bed.
All this means a higher cost base to amortize – making yield optimization the success metric. While horticulturalists are green-thumbed experts, few can keep a thousand-parameter database in their head. The good news: to make sense of that data, there’s software.
From Automation to Orchestration: The Role of Software
Plant growth, in itself, may not be complex. Maintain the soil, follow a watering schedule, and as long as the sun doesn’t go nova (or more likely in CEA, an ultraviolet lamp goes dark) you’ll see signs of life in your grow beds. For home gardeners, this is often rewarding enough.
But in greenhouse operations, the wholesale price of a crop – and thus the grower’s profit – can vary by hundreds of dollars per consignment, based on size, shape, color, flavor and more. (Visual inspection is a huge part of many horticultural auctions: witness the Netherlands’ huge flower markets.) So the goal isn’t best-effort – it’s best-outcome.
In horticulture especially, these factors interact. More watering may produce a bigger eggplant – but a worse flavor. Less fertilizer may give you points among organic buyers – but create greater risk of disease for a whole greenhouse. And so on.
A Question of Scale: The Challenge Horticulture Beginners Underestimate
What matters is finding the “sweet spot” in your individual setup that takes all the right numbers into account and tells you what works best. Your hours of sunlight. Your access to soil enrichers. Your costs of electricity; land rent; local business taxes; labor. Here’s a partial list of data inputs relevant to horticulture:
- Soil composition and depletion rate
- Water volumes and irrigation schedules
- Growing timescales and harvesting cycles
- Light and shading over the day
- Air movement and replacement time
- Heating levels (ground and ambient)
- Greenhouse humidity and dew point
- Biome management from root zone to canopy area
These inputs aren’t constant across controlled environment agriculture – they’re specific to each greenhouse operation, and may even be different for two nurseries in adjacent fields. And that’s the value of digitalization in horticulture …
… because even if you’re small in scale, the right horticulture software can bring these inputs together. Which means you can work through What-If scenarios, plan tests and experiments, and see what happens if a factor is changed – even customizing for individual plants to get the most from each one.
Such optimizations aren’t just about growing plants … but about growing your business.
Why Software Is Now the Backbone of Greenhouse Operations
So horticulture software leads to healthier plants that attract more buyers and make more money. It also lets you “customize” products for niche markets, just as fashion companies sell in different styles.
One city likes black orchids while another prefers purple? One supermarket chain likes sweet peppers while another likes them spicy? By creating the ideal conditions for each varietal – even the recipe of micro- and macro-nutrients in your fertilizer mix – you can supply both. Diversifying your market as well as deepening it.
And in addition to physical inputs like soil and water, there’s another factor whose cost always seems to be going up: electricity. Whatever the plant, it will have an optimum schedule for switching on grow lamps and heating pads. The right one won’t just make best use of kilowatt-hours: it’ll shorten your growing cycles so you can produce more of each product year-round.
The software ICT Strypes can create for you – a complete digital platform for controlled environment agriculture – lets you scale your business as well as manage it. Even if your inputs are many and varied.
Horticulture Software: The Control Pane inside the Greenhouse Panes
The application layer that uses all this data is known by many names. Depending who you talk to, it’s a “Control Surface”, “Control Plane”, “Single Source of Truth” or – appropriate for horticulture – a “Single Pane of Glass”. Whatever you call it, it refers to the screen that shows you information about your operation, making sense of data as it changes day by day.
Enabling that advantage takes more than just software. It needs an integrated agricultural software platform – combining information from outside sources, the array of sensors and machinery that gather data and take action, and the application you use at your desk.
A software platform for horticulture gives you the right “levers” to control and manage your whole area under glass – at whatever scale you operate – and automate key processes to optimize cost and material factors. Just as in past decades you’d be walking up and down the raised beds, looking at plants with a critical eye, noting down information and gathering new knowledge you’d use to improve things next season. Today, software does the same – faster, more accurately, and backed by reliable data, while needing fewer back-breaking human hours in the greenhouse.
And that’s the value ICT Strypes adds. Because our knowledge spans all areas – it’s a solution that goes from “soil to software”. Or perhaps “dirt to database”.
Today, effective horticulture isn’t just about farming the land. It’s about farming the data.
Software as a Strategic Asset in Horticulture
That’s how we think of horticulture at ICT Strypes: a system to be managed and controlled with data. By adopting technology for today’s greenhouse and combining it with a custom solution for your operations – however large or small your greenhouse – you can make products more profitable, and cycles more consistent, and business growth smoother.
To be outstanding in your field (rather, in your greenhouse) contact ICT Strypes: