ROI calculator
What would robots save your greenhouse?
Put in your greenhouse and the jobs you'd hand over. Defaults come from Wageningen research where it exists and are marked as estimates where it doesn't. Change any of them.
Your greenhouse
All-in: wages, agency margin, housing and travel.
All crop work: harvesting, leaves, twisting, lowering and the rest. The default is for tomatoes; change it if your crop differs.
Jobs to hand over
SPINE is the base. Switch on the jobs you'd give the robots, and set how much of each they take.
SPINE
The base
Rides the heating pipes and carries whichever module the job needs.
BLUSH
Harvesting
Picks ripe fruit, checks the stem before the jaws close, and wraps the fruit instead of squeezing it.
HOIST
Lowering and rehanging
Lowers the plants and moves the hooks along the wire.
RAVEN
Scouting
Walks the rows for pests and disease, and marks where they start.
Assumptions
Vinea is rented like a crew, service included, and always priced below the labour it replaces. This share is provisional until after the pilot.
How much dearer labour gets each year.
Turns hours into people.
Job by job
- Robots
- Still by hand
BLUSHHarvesting
€422,037 / €180,873
SHEARDeleafing
€378,378 / €162,162
Year by year
- All by hand
- With Vinea
| Year | All by hand | With Vinea |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | €1,143,450 | €903,326 |
| 2 | €1,177,754 | €930,425 |
| 3 | €1,213,086 | €958,338 |
| 4 | €1,249,479 | €987,088 |
| 5 | €1,286,963 | €1,016,701 |
How it's worked out
- Crop hours = area × crop-work hours per hectare.
- A job's hours = crop hours × that job's share.
- Robot hours = a job's hours × how much of it the robots take over.
- Labour replaced = robot hours × labour cost. Rent = labour replaced × Vinea's share. Saving = labour replaced − rent.
- Each later year grows by the wage growth you set. People = robot hours ÷ the hours a worker puts in.
- The WUR shares are for the six main crop jobs in tomato: harvesting, removing leaves, de-shooting and twisting, clipping, lowering and truss pruning. Laid over all your crop hours, they run a little high if some of those hours go to other work.
- Lowering and scouting have no published share. The six main jobs leave about a quarter of the hours to clipping, lowering and truss pruning, so lowering starts at a third of that. Scouting starts as a guess.
Sources
- Crop-work hours and job shares: WUR GWorkS tomato report, citing Woerden (2005) and Van Beveren (2010)
- Harvesting at €5 per m² a year: a Westland tomato grower, interviewed in 2026