Summary

Sylva nurseries grows and grades about 25 million forest and hedging plants annually in Belgium. The company’s productivity received a boost with help from CAP funds for investment in a new state of the art grading machine. This digitised and automated equipment addressed efficiency bottlenecks in the company’s production process and provides increased flexibility for staff.

Results

More than 25 million plants were graded during 2019, 2020 and 2021. This helped the company’s performance through increased professional efficiency.

The machine had to be made very durable. The products are very difficult to automatise as there is a lot of ground, leaves and humidity so all machinery parts had to be protected from the products.

As a lot of unexperienced young people work in the company, the vision and detection of quality had to be developed to grade a wide variety of plants.