Empowering Breeding for Strip Cropping With Drone-Based Insights

Technology Partnership Accelerating Agricultural Insights

Trial Location: Vitalis

Enza Zaden’s organic location in Voorst, the Netherlands focuses entirely on the Vitalis brand. This location specializes in trialling vegetable varieties under organic conditions. It’s Enza Zaden’s hub for organic research and development activities worldwide and for global organic seed production tailored to organic farming systems.

In 2021, Enza Zaden started a six-year study together with Wageningen University & Research within the CropMix project, which studies the ‘strip cropping’ cultivation system. This research focuses on understanding crop interaction and identifying key traits that are important for different crops to perform well in a diversified, future-proof cultivation system.

Drone operator flying a drone over the Vitalis strip cropping field in Voorst

Mutually Beneficial Collaboration for Sustainable Agriculture

The collaboration between Enza Zaden and VITO Remote Sensing brings substantial benefits to both partners. Enza Zaden gains access to detailed, data-driven insights through MAPEO, VITO’s cutting-edge drone data processing and analytics platform. This platform enables them to fine-tune strip cropping strategies for improved crop performance, resource efficiency, and ecological resilience. These insights support more targeted breeding decisions and accelerate the development of varieties tailored to sustainable, diversified farming systems.

At the same time, VITO Remote Sensing leverages this partnership to demonstrate the real-world value of the MAPEO platform in complex agricultural environments. By applying their technology in a forward-looking breeding context, VITO not only validates its practical relevance but also contributes directly to measurable sustainability impact in the agricultural sector.

Together, VITO Remote Sensing and Enza Zaden are paving the way for a more sustainable and productive agricultural future, demonstrating the power of technology and collaboration in transforming farming practices.

Close-up of the Vitalis field in Voorst with crops growing in strips

The Advantages of Strip Cropping

Strip cropping is an agricultural practice that involves growing different types of crops in adjacent, alternating strips within a single field. Unlike traditional monoculture systems, where one crop dominates an entire area, strip cropping creates a more diverse field layout resembling a patchwork of complementary crops working in synergy.

This method is gaining renewed interest in the context of sustainable agriculture, as it offers a wide range of environmental, agronomic, and even economic benefits. At its core, strip cropping is a nature-based solution that draws inspiration from natural ecosystems, where plant diversity is the norm rather than the exception.

Enhancing Soil Health

One of the primary sustainability advantages of strip cropping is its positive impact on soil health. Different crops have distinct root systems and nutrient requirements. By alternating deep-rooted and shallow-rooted crops, strip cropping helps improve soil structure, prevent compaction, and enhance nutrient cycling. Moreover, it can reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers, as legumes like beans, peas, or grass-clover mixtures can naturally fix nitrogen in the soil, benefiting neighbouring crops.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

By supporting a range of crops within a single field, strip cropping boosts on-farm biodiversity: it benefits pollinators, beneficial insects, and soil microorganisms. This biodiversity contributes to ecosystem resilience and provides essential services like pollination, pest control, and organic matter decomposition.

Pest and Disease Suppression

Crop diversity also acts as a natural barrier against pests and diseases. In a monoculture system, pests can easily spread across an entire field. In contrast, strip cropping disrupts pest movement and reduces their spread by integrating less susceptible or repellent crops. Furthermore, the increased biodiversity in insect populations will create more activity of natural enemies, leading to faster control of pest populations.

Erosion Control

Soil erosion is a major concern in conventional farming, particularly on sloped terrains. Strip cropping mitigates this by providing continuous ground cover, especially when strips include cover crops or crops with dense foliage. The varied root systems stabilize the soil, reducing runoff and preventing valuable topsoil from being washed away during heavy rainfall.

Climate Resilience

Strip cropping can also increase resilience to climate extremes. A diverse cropping system is less likely to suffer complete failure during droughts, floods, or pest outbreaks. Different crops have different tolerances and maturation timelines, allowing for more stable yields under unpredictable weather patterns.

How MAPEO Enhances Strip Cropping Trials at Vitalis

Innovative breeding strategies like those at Enza Zaden’s Vitalis location in Voorst rely heavily on accurate and timely data. When trials involve complex systems such as strip cropping, where multiple crops interact across space and time, the need for efficient, high-resolution monitoring becomes even more critical. That’s where the MAPEO platform, developed by VITO Remote Sensing, delivers significant value.

MAPEO is a modular, drone-based phenotyping platform designed to streamline the collection, processing, and analysis of field trial data. It transforms raw drone imagery into actionable insights, allowing researchers and breeders to assess crop performance with unprecedented speed, precision, and scalability.

MAPEO screen

High-Resolution Monitoring at Scale

Traditionally, phenotyping in breeding trials relied on manual observations and field notes, which are time-consuming, labour-intensive, and often subjective. MAPEO replaces this with high-frequency drone flights that capture multispectral and RGB imagery across entire trial fields in a matter of minutes. These images are then stitched, calibrated, and processed using AI-powered analytics pipelines, enabling fast detection and quantification of differences in growth patterns, vigour, canopy cover, biomass, and stress indicators across crop strips. All of this would not be possible with the ‘naked eye’ approach.

For the researchers at the Vitalis location, this means they can monitor a wide array of strip cropping set-ups across multiple locations with a consistent and scalable methodology. This solution saves time and resources and increases data reliability.

Drones on the Vitalis strip cropping field in Voorst

Quantifying Interactions and Variability

One of the unique challenges in strip cropping trials is the interaction between adjacent crops. MAPEO enables precise quantification of how different crop combinations influence each other in terms of growth, disease pressure, and competition. By mapping these interactions spatially and temporally, breeders gain early-stage insights into which combinations are synergistic and which may require adjustment.

For example, the analytics helped researchers at the Vitalis location to profoundly understand the interaction between pumpkin and cauliflower, which would not have been possible without the time series-based drone data over several years of data collection. Leaf cover data in cauliflower showed a strong correlation with the number of growing days needed to form a fully mature curd. Plants with a higher increase in leaf cover in the first four weeks showed a significantly lower number of growing days to reach full maturity.

This ability to detect spatial dynamics across the various crops, down to the plant or row level, empowers Enza Zaden to fine-tune breeding selections not just for individual crop performance, but for system-level outcomes like resilience, complementarity, and resource efficiency.

Interaction between pumpkin and cauliflower

Faster Breeding Cycles and Decision-Making

With faster access to reliable phenotypic data, Enza Zaden can make more informed breeding decisions earlier in the season. This reduces the trial-and-error cycle inherent to breeding and helps accelerate the development of varieties optimized for strip cropping systems. Moreover, because MAPEO automates much of the data handling and analysis, breeders can spend less time on data processing and more time interpreting results and adjusting their strategies accordingly.

Building a Digital Knowledge Base

All data collected through MAPEO is stored in a structured and accessible way, making it easier for Enza Zaden to build a long-term digital knowledge base. This not only supports ongoing research and development but also creates a rich dataset for training predictive models in future breeding efforts.

Join us at the CropIB Conference

Would you also like to make your crops more climate-resilient with the help of drone data insights? Join us at the CROP Innovation & Business Conference in Wageningen during 29-31 March! Our team of remote sensing experts is looking forward to demonstrating our innovative agricultural and environmental research tools, including MAPEO.