With the Chinese horticulture market on the rise, there are huge opportunities for both investors and suppliers. However, as both groups might recall, it’s not an easy market. There’s a gap between the Chinese demands and the suppliers offerings in knowledge, language, culture and other topics. That’s wher the Chinese company AgriGarden comes in. With their extensive knowledge of the technologies as well as the Chinese market, they’ve realized various projects over the past 16 years. “Nowadays the ROI of projects is more important than ever”, Ms. Laurie from AgriGarden says.

Ever since it’s establishment in 2002, AgriGarden realized several of China’s most impressive modern agriculture projects: The first Chinese urban agriculture project “Cofco farm” near Beijing for example, the Yellow river Delta agriculture high tech zone and this year’s Guizhou project. Their precise activities vary per project, but in all of them AgriGarden operates as a full service contractor. They participate in projects from the very beginning to the operation of the projects. “We are building up a strong global network and trying our best to work closely with our clients as well as our suppliers, to make sure all of our partners and suppliers are working well together to deliver more efficient, safe and fast services”, says Ms. Laurie.

“We are moving on with more strategic cooperation with our Dutch partners, besides we also have collaborative partnerships with companies from Japan, South Korea and other countries. We believe that if we have more knowledgeable companies working together, we can have a comprehensive and innovative concept for each project. That is a critical goal we set with all the ongoing collaborations.”

More diversified investors
What investors required before and what they are demanding now has been changing. “We always have to consider the demands of our investors, earlier, one main goal was to finish the project as soon as possible this is a very common goal, until now it is still a main goal”, Ms. Laurie laughs. “However, it is no longer common to only construct and deliver a project, nowadays every investor requires a convincing Return of Investment (ROI) model. There is another big change, which is that before it was only the government that invested in horticulture, now we could see that more diversified investors are coming in.”

Educating growers
“In our business activities, there are fast growing needs for the post-realization service: not only building the projects, but operation as well. Just to give an example, if in one year we could construct five different projects, normally two of them require operation services. We can give training to the local team or take over the complete operation of the farm ourselves. Meanwhile, we’ve collected contacts of professional growers and when necessary have them work with the local team of the farm, to educate them how to operate the project independently. There are many enthusiastic growers in China, however we still need to learn a lot from the Dutch growers.”

Booming industry
When asking Ms. Laurie whether the horticulture business in China would stay as booming as it is now over the coming years, she replied: “Well, each market has it limits. Indeed, there is still a lot of place left for more investments to emphasis, there will be more focus and demands on qualified operation of the farms. "