In spite of the many benefits of high-tech for agriculture, it is only today it expanding over horticulture after having set its sights on other more profitable and more easy to deal with such as automotive, chemicals or energy.

Proof of this is that the CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique) had long invested in the previous fields of business when it opened only five years ago in Grenoble, a position intended for the valuation of its portfolio of « technological bricks » in agro-food. I notice also that in the niche market of horticulture, the majority of technologies offered by digital players are outdated compared to the state of the art on the B2C market. Moreover, the solutions offered by the majority of suppliers in horticulture, are most of time diverted from their originally intended use for the needs of either the building industry or other manufacturing sectors. Whereas in horticulture, the drastic conditions of use and greater technical requirements justify the development of specific equipment. As regards to process management in greenhouse for example, standard solutions come up against their limits when it comes to precisely and steadily aiming for the many setpoints requested by the grower (temperature, hygrometry, light, CO2 levels, air movement, both acidity and nutrient concentration of irrigation). This performance is all the more difficult to achieve as the permeable and transparent shell of the greenhouse imposes the influence of the external climate on the inside where the transpiration activity of the crop is also exerted.

Apart from the low profitability of agriculture and the narrowness of its outlets, its delay in innovation as regards to the high-tech, is probably due to the fact that living organisms hardly lend themselves to standardization as well as to the mistrust of a majority of consumers and (some) growers toward the technology they oppose to agricultural processes that are supposed to be natural, which has always been far from being the case. By punishing intensive practices through the purchase of produces from either organic or reasoned agriculture, citizens blame high-techs for their responsibility in the industrialization of an agriculture fantasized as having to be necessarily traditional. Technology is made implicitly guilty of a regression in our relationship to the environment because of the scale s savings that go hand in hand with standardization, while at the social level, less use of human labor makes it suspect of Taylorism.

I believe that facing the emergency imposed by climate change and given the need to preserve water and energy resources while alleviating the shortage of skills, we have even less choice to do without high tech that the demand for food raw materials from a growing mankind is exponential. And all the more so as the come back of extreme poverty combined with commercial and financial globalization imposes on horticulture an economic efficiency that technology is now making possible. From this point of view, the advantages of digital undoubtedly outweigh its disadvantages.

We are fortunately witnessing an advent of high tech which far exceeds in its magnitude the precedent of the 2000s. The very recent emergence of the Internet of Things, big data, deep-learning, Artificial Intelligence, cloud and other new technologies exerts a powerful leverage effect on innovation which is able to considerably extend the field of possibilities in horticulture. This advent will undoubtedly allow more complex horticultural farms, some of which are increasingly large, to access industry standard tools such as ERP and other means intended for management control or process traceability, among other examples. By virtue of the adage that the organ creates the function, it seems clear to me that horticulture will make a use of the previous means as soon as they are made available by digital suppliers. I therefore believe that the question is no longer whether the previous technologies will be adopted by growers, but when they will be.

The answer to this question logically depends on the level of investment in research by technology providers, which is becoming more than ever the first condition necessary for them to survive. This condition is undoubtedly the sinews of war in high tech where not being ahead is like being late. Today, the high number of new technologies acts as a factor in increasing inequalities between digital players. The gap is becoming bigger between those who are able to take advantage of it and those who are doomed to drop out in a sector which is currently negotiating its turn towards maturity.

In fact, we are witnessing the slow withdrawal of the pioneers that are the family small-sized companies who had bet on their domestic market but who no longer have the means to finance research because of a too narrow customer base. Disqualified by the obsolescence of their range, these companies handicapped by their small size have little choice but to disappear or to confine themselves to the low-tech segment rightly targeted at extensive agriculture.

As for ETIs (Intermediate Size Companies) who had bet on the world market by choosing a strategy based on massive investment in sales, they will unwittingly face the reality they have taken the wrong road.

We are clearly at a turning point which clearly show there is only one way to digital players in horticulture: that of innovation.

More generally, I think this trend is part of a paradigm shift in the market economy. At the end of the war, the emergency of reconstruction had given power to production in companies. Throughout the glorious thirty years, it passed into the hands of marketing and sales, requested to dispose of the sometimes excess volumes produced by the previous ones. In the era of knowledge and hence digital, it is now up to engineers and technicians to meet the new challenges mentioned in this article.

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