Interreg

The project E&D Agro, Energy Transition and Drying in the agricultural sector, which has been running since 01-01-2019, is developing innovations for drying agricultural products, improving earth probes for heat pumps and energy transition of machines by replacing internal combustion engines with electric drives. It is a project with 7 Dutch and German partners.
The footprint of agriculture has to be seen in a broad sense, even a processing process such as drying, for example, has a very large energy input. In addition to the direct cost aspect that arises from the use of fossil fuels, indirect aspects are increasingly playing a role as well. Customers of products demand that the footprint of the value chain is drastically reduced. This calls for innovations. The project investigates new techniques and develops alternatives. In a pilot project, an existing dry floor installation running on LPG will be converted to a system that uses electricity from a PV installation, heat from the roof and a heat pump that uses ambient air (in summer) and heat from the ground (in winter). In another pilot project, geothermal probes will be improved by a new desing and by using new materials. In this way much more heat can be “harvested” from the ground than with the current plastic probes. In a third pilot, mobile drying installations in shipping containers will be used. This system, in which the harvested products are dried near the field without having to be transported far, makes it possible to work very efficiently, using sustainable energy here as well. Innovations are also being developed for other machines that play a role in this, e.g. as drilling equipment, in order to minimise emissions and CO2 footprint.
At the moment (September 2020), the components that deal with the subject of drilling and earth probes are already well advanced. The drying concepts are in preparation and construction is being started in order to be able to carry out the first practical tests in the coming harvesting period.