KARIYA, Japan (April.24,2025)－DENSO CORPORATION and DELPHY GROEP BV have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) aimed at developing and promoting data-driven smart horticulture*1.
Recently, the instability of agricultural production caused by factors such as climate change and the decline in the farming population, as well as the resulting food shortages has become pressing issues. Under these circumstances, there is a global need to enable anyone a stable, sustainable agricultural production, anytime, in any environment.
DENSO has been engaged in the horticultural business by leveraging technology developed in the automotive sector. By developing environmental control systems and greenhouses for horticulture, as well as harvest robots*2, DENSO has continuously enhanced its sensing capabilities in greenhouse IoT and harvesting processes.
DELPHY is a leading cultivation consulting company, staffed by numerous experts with extensive, long-term experience in cultivation support. The cultivation management software QMS*3 provided by DELPHY inputs climate data such as temperature and sunlight, along with crop data including fruit counts and weights, into a mathematical plant growth model. By using these data to plan cultivation, DELPHY has been assisting producers in achieving stable, long-term cultivation.
By drawing on their respective strengths, DENSO and DELPHY have signed the MOU to begin exploring data-driven smart horticulture, which optimizes the cultivation environment and methods by consolidating and utilizing data essential for crop growth. The main initiatives are as follows:
■ System Development to Achieve Stable Planned CultivationBy automatically collecting crop data—which growers have until now observed visually or measured by hand—through DENSO’s sensing technology, accuracy is enhanced. Furthermore, by entering this crop data into DELPHY ’s QMS, it becomes possible to improve the precision of cultivation planning. Subsequently, by leveraging that cultivation plan to control the greenhouse environment and provide instructions to workers or automated equipment, stable and planned cultivation can be achieved. The two companies will explore the development of a series of systems to realize this stable, planned cultivation.
■ System Development for Cultivation Simulation under a Digital Twin*4 EnvironmentBy using DENSO’s digital twin technology, it becomes possible to recreate in three-dimensional data the plant structure that would result from cultivating based on the cultivation plan devised by DELPHY’s QMS. This enables analysis and prediction of crop growth in a digital twin environment even before actual cultivation takes place. Both companies will explore the development of a series of systems to realize these cultivation simulations.
Based on the MOU, DENSO and DELPHY aim to interlink these two systems to realize data-driven smart horticulture by 2030. Together, the two companies will accelerate initiatives worldwide to achieve stable and sustainable agriculture.