The cultivation of orchids is a resource heavy business. The plants need reliable heat, light, water and nutrients, over many months.
The application of genetics and other techniques can only speed it up so far. Ultimately you have to let the plant grow, confirm the characteristics – flower shape and size, colour, the number of stems, resistance to disease and so on – and then make another selection.
That process takes the young plants by airfreight to India, and by lorry to Poland, before they return to the Floricultura site in Heemskerk in North Holland, where there are more than seven hectares of greenhouse space for both development and production.
Rainwater is harvested from the greenhouse roofs and in response to changing weather patterns, the company are now beginning to recycle that water, and the nutrients it contains, for secondary use.
Wart van Zonneveld proudly showed me their geothermal well, which pumps water up from 3km below the surface, at a temperature of 102C.
It provides so much energy that they are exploring sharing it with the local council for district heating projects.
It’s not only the monitoring that is automated. In the vast greenhouses, trays of plants shuttle around on rollers, which deliver them to the next stage of cultivation in sequence.
There remains one task which, at Floricultura at least, is reserved for humans.
Whilst the tools for developing new varieties, cloning new plants and assessing the results have all been transformed by technological innovation, the decision on which varieties, after nine years of work, make it into the catalogue is still made by Stefan Kuiper and his colleagues in person.
A plant can have tick all the genetic boxes and produce all the right traits, but it has to be beautiful to sell – and that’s a judgement made by people.
“Breeding is a little bit [like] gambling”, Kuiper says, and for now that human element remains.
