Cerescon

Cerescon is a very young, fast developing high tech startup. Cerescon is aiming at the development, the production and the marketing of an automated selective asparagus harvesting machine for white asparagus. Asparagus production is up till now a very labour intensive part of horticulture. The so called “white gold” is up till now harvested manually by thousands of manual workers.

Cerescon is the first company that successfully has proven the feasibility of an automatic asparagus harvesting machine. We now face the challenge to bring this innovation to a successful product and to let Cerescon grow to a successful company; a global player in selective harvesting.

Asparagus farmers have 3 keydrivers:  the harvesting costs, the quality of the harvested asparagus and the yield per hectare.

Cerescons innovation is based on a few unique patented features influencing all key drivers.

• subsurface detection which results in higher quality asparagus as violet colouring and flowering becomes less.
• cutting robot which results in less subsurface damage
• sandbed recovery resulting in less curved asparagus over the season
• plastic handling resulting in higher production capacity of the machine

The Cerescon solution is a 3-row machine, pulled by a tractor. It can harvest 1 ha/hour. Due to the subsurface detection, harvesting every 2 to 3 days is possible which makes a machine suitable to harvest 40 hectares per season replacing 75 manual workers, bringing cutting cost down with 50%.