Where we stand today
In order to get strong, disease-free and pest-free plants, growers preventively deploy natural enemies to repel harmful insects. In greenhouse cultivation, chemical pesticides are used only as a last resort. Growers minimise the use of such products, and only ever apply them in the places that need them. This way, natural crop protectors are spared.
Goals for 2025
By 2025, 100% of our growers will meet the Planetproof standard
on the kilograms of active ingredients per hectare.
How we will make it happen
There are many different ongoing crop protection initiatives within our cooperative. Here are a few examples.
planet
proof
At Growers United, all our aubergine, sweet pepper, and cucumber growers and more and more of our tomato growers are PlanetProof certified. This is an independent quality mark for more sustainable products. It proves that you are buying a product that has been produced more sustainably and is therefore better for nature, the environment, the climate, and animals.
bumblebees, are our most
industrious workers
Our tomatoes, aubergines, cucumbers, and sweet peppers are also known as fruit vegetables. Every fruit starts out as a flower. Bumblebees pollinate every flower seven days a week without missing out a single one. In this way they ensure perfect pollination, which in turn results in the most beautiful fruits.
greening the
way we grow
There is a clear growth in the use of green crop protection products on the total acreage. At Growers United, we were running a pilot entitled ”˜Growing Greener’. The aim of this pilot is to enable us to grow green all year round, in other words, without the use of chemical crop protection. In this pilot, our tomato grower Marcel van den Berg succeeded in using no chemicals at all in his greenhouse. He used natural predators preventively and only used green crop protection products.