Internship experiences Bert Rijk

During my studies in Geo-Information and remote sensing, I wrote my thesis at Dacom in the last year, in collaboration with Jacob van den Borme. A thesis from a Master program in Wageningen is almost always carried out within the University, because you are trained as a researcher. Because I did not see my future in scientific research, I decided to write my thesis at a company. Dacom was keen to facilitate this, and had installed some sensors at Jacob van den Borne.


A thesis is of course different from an internship, but I have tried to make it as practical as possible. In my research I looked at how we can use crop growth simulation models to make predictions of yield and how we can add sensor data. In my research I used Dacom weather and soil moisture sensors, satellite images & hand sensors, a crop growth model (Lintul) from the WUR and yield data from Jacob. Data is of course on the rise, and Van den Borne has a unique amount of data as a company to participate in this type of research. Because my thesis overlapped with the summer / harvest time, I had a bit of a delay by participating in the potato harvest at various farmers, but thanks to the constructive guidance of Lammert Kooistra I managed to get it right.

I can advise everyone to do the thesis in a practical situation. In addition to learning about the activities of the commercial world (in addition to science), it is also much more motivating to do research where there is concrete demand and application in business. Too often thesis studies that disappear in the archives without anyone ever looking at them, I think this is a missed opportunity.

Although the result of my thesis research was far from perfect, it has laid the foundation for the worlds of botany and sensor data to converge. Dacom has partly used my research as the basis for its current developments regarding the Ceres growth model and WUR also has growth models as a permanent subject.