On 12th and 13th April Martin Collison led a group including Mark Suthern and Oliver McEntyre of Barclays Bank, Sir Peter Kendall and Tom Hind of AHDB and David Gardner and Andrew Lazenby of Innovation for Agriculture to the Netherlands to look at why the productivity growth rate in the Netherlands has been four times faster than in the UK. Organised with Peter Paree of Southern Netherlands farmers union, ZLTO, the visit included visits to highly automated glasshouse and dairy farms, meeting the ZLTO chairman, the Head of Agriculture at Rabobank, senior executives from Lely in the week they celebrated 25 years of robotic milking machines and Wageningen University Research (WUR).
