Weerbare Plant

This interview details Weerbare Plant, a company based in the Netherlands. The interview is with Jantineke Hofland-Zijlstra, Owner of Weerbare Plant.

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What is the origin story of Weerbare Plant?

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The story of Weerbare Plant started in 2021 when I decided to start with my own advisory services for horticultural companies as a plant resilient coach. With my previous knowledge of plant resilient research as a researcher in applied horticulture at Wageningen UR Horticulture, I gained a lot of information on how plants can defend themselves against pests and diseases and how growers can support their crops to become more resistant. I notice, that there is a huge interest in independent advice and sometimes growers or advisors just want to hear that the practices they already have taken make sense and that they are on the right track. 

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What are some of the biggest challenges facing Weerbare Plant in the future?

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One of the main challenges was to find solid business partners. In cooperation with education company, Terra Trainingen, we set up three different courses for advisors and growers to learn how they can work on a robust and resilient cropping system. My background is in horticulture, but during the courses, I also met a lot of arable farmers and contractors who were also very eager to learn more about controlling plant diseases, plant resilience, and the background of biostimulants.

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What is unique about Weerbare Plant compared to competitors?

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I am not only passionate about sharing knowledge through courses and presentations but also about developing new research projects. In cooperation with biological crop protection company Valto (De Lier, The Netherlands) and testing facility, TomatoWorld (Honselersdijk, The Netherlands) we are developing a biological testing system as an indicator for plant resistance. In a tomato crop, we set up the testing system with a fungal leaf pathogen, Botrytis cinerea, and used leaves from different cultivars to validate the testing unit. In the summer period, we extended the test with leaves from the facility of TomatoWorld, where plants were grown on different types of substrates.

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What are some other relevant metrics of the company (growing area size, production quantity, team size, etc.)?

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To learn more about the activity of soil organisms in substrates, new projects in strawberries have been initiated together with Kytos (Belgium). They have developed new monitoring techniques to analyze populations of beneficial bacteria in water systems and from this, we try to learn the actual effect of management practices and biostimulants on plant health.  

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What are some goals in 2024 and beyond for Weerbare Plant?

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The goals for this year are to learn more about increasing plant resilience and integrated crop management in both horticultural and arable crops and work hard on this together with partners to make a real difference in healthier and sustainable crops in the field. 

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How can people connect with you or learn more about Weerbare Plant?

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For more information people can contact me by email, LinkedIn, or leave a message on the website: www.weerbareplant.nl 

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