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This year, SIVAL attracted 703 exhibitors, 15 per cent from abroad, and 25,000 trade visitors.
Preparations are underway for the 38th SIVAL, France’s premier commercial plant cultivation show that will return to Angers between 16-18 January 2025. Read on to learn more about its past January 2024 edition.
As the summer of 2024 draws to an end, French event organiser Destination Angers is working hard to prepare for the 38th edition of the SIVAL trade show. Once again, the show will offer attendees plenty of new products and services, plus a top-notch educational programme.
True to tradition, the Parc des Expositions convention centre in Angers will be the venue of choice.
The show’s 2025 tagline is ‘The future of plant production starts here.’ This future will be increasingly marked by international collaboration, fostering curiosity, perspective, knowledge sharing, and learning. Collaborative work led to plans for a SIVAL satellite show in Senegal.
SIVAL (the abbreviation stands of Salon International des productions du VegetAL specialisé) is one of France’s iconic agricultural trade shows. This year, it attracted 703 exhibitors, 15 per cent from abroad, and 25,000 trade visitors.
Québec was prominently present at the 2024 show. The participation of the largest of Canada’s ten provinces (in area) in SIVAL occurred in the slipstream of the ‘2023 France-Québec Year of Innovation’.
Also particularly strong are the ties between SIVAL’s homeland, the Loire Valley (since the 15th century dubbed as the Jardin de la France or the Garden of France) and the horticultural heartland of the Netherlands.
In January of this year, the Dutch ambassador to France, Jan Versteeg, visited the trade exhibition. Meanwhile, during a Franco-Dutch networking event, Dutch agricultural counsellor Martijn Weijtens and his team highlighted the many business opportunities in agriculture now that plant-based diets, healthy food, fruits, and vegetables are so prominent.
France aims to become more self-sufficient in fruit and vegetable production, so the French government has significant funding available for sustainable greenhouse construction, orchard renewal, R&D, machinery, and biocontrols.
Bruno Dupont, president of SIVAL and a former apple grower from Allonnes, is happy with the presence of many industry peers from abroad.
In a meeting with the international press on the opening day of SIVAL 2024, he said, “Our international attendance increases year on year, and that’s something we are particularly proud of. More recently, I spoke to a hortipreneur from Libya, a country where we hardly get visitors from. It proves that many countries want to change their agricultural practices in light of climate change. Moreover, with political instability around the world, there’s more attention for self-sufficiency in food production, plus consumers are growing increasingly critical, asking for a secure supply of healthy food.”
The French-made Aisprid robot de-leafs tomato plants 24/7 and has received the Sival Gold Medal. Enza Zaden’s HREZ range of tomato varieties, highly resistant to the Tomato Brown Rugose Fruit Virus (ToBRFV), also won a Sival Gold Medal.
The SIVAL show connects professionals from the protected cropping industry, the fruit and vegetable and arable sector, viticulture, oenology, arboriculture, and seed/young plant industry with companies providing cutting-edge machinery, technology, equipment, plant breeding, and services. A format that Dupont calls “absolutely unique. These different sub-sectors of agriculture contribute to the event’s success.”
Dupont also touched on the challenges faced by French agriculture and horticulture. “As in other parts of the world, France’s farming population is growing older. There has been a grand retour of people who waved agriculture goodbye but are now returning to the countryside. They are mostly 30-40 years old and active in agricultural jobs. The reality, however, is that the influx of newcomers doesn’t compensate for the retiring farmers. Interestingly, the number of agricultural students at our lycées is on the rise; many want to be trained as farmers, but once they finish their studies, they often find jobs in adjoining sectors. This explains our show’s extensive feature area on agricultural education.”
Young people also need deep pockets to acquire a farm as agricultural exploitation grows. Next is the eternal problem of labour shortage. To solve this and many other issues, it is important to look beyond national borders. Dupont noted, “For our apple farm, we recruited people from North Africa, including a management comprised of Moroccan professionals. A sizeable number of Dutch farmers also installed themselves in our country. As such, they also helped revive the small villages in the countryside.”
Other sector concerns include climate change, with heavy rains flooding homes and crops in northern France in November 2023. Also, for French farmers, overcoming years of uncertainty, EU overregulation, bureaucracy, and underinvestment has not always been easy.
Dupont said, “We hope these dark, difficult years are behind us. The good thing is that farmers are resilient and friendly people. They like to come to SIVAL because it’s a place to learn, share knowledge, and meet.”
New market entrant Supplied by Peter is run by seasoned industry professional Peter Nederlof, who started a business representing TTA machinery, Schneider Young Plants, Evanthia, Rijnbeek Perennials, Lensli Substrates, and Zabo flower bulbs, amongst others.
Dupont believes that by spreading its wings into the African continent, SIVAL also has a humanitarian role to play. Dupont elaborated, “I travelled to Senegal frequently, and its agricultural sector has huge potential but needs to get organised. Setting up a specialised agricultural trade show can greatly boost African farming. By improving rural livelihoods and lifting people out of poverty, we can hopefully also reduce the number of migrants who leave the African continent each year. Only then, the day Africa sells more food than arms may become a reality.”
Mireille Rucart of Voltz Horticulture strongly advocates using annuals in city plantings, as nothing rivals the explosion of colours they provide throughout the season.
Next year, SIVAL 2025 will be held at the Parc des Expositions convention centre in Angers from 16 to 18 January.
Its presence in ornamental horticulture is quite stable, with the big names in young plant/seed production, such as Graines Voltz, Selecta One, Beekenkamp, and Syngenta, always giving the acte de présence.
Occupying pride of place are the show’s Innovation and Agreen Startup Concours. The latter enables projects to receive development grants, thus reinforcing the aim of promoting innovation in the different sectors to help agriculture answer societal expectations.
Visit www.sival-angers.com.
Good for Gold
Trap-Eye, designed by Delft-based PATS and sold in France by Biobest France, is an innovative service that automates monitoring flying insects in crops.
With 40 Trap-Eye detection units per hectare, the subscription guarantees a complete and uniform overview of greenhouses so that no outbreak is missed. It’s the only tool that allows growers to visualise the situation in the greenhouse without having to travel or use any workforce.
The system comprises a camera for each detection unit, photographing the sticky trap once or thrice a week. These units are easy to install, as they need to be magnetised to the greenhouse poles. Furthermore, the solar panels they are fitted with make them self-sufficient in energy; only the gateway unit needs to be connected to the power supply system.
Thanks to its system, the gateway unit transmits all the images collected to the artificial intelligence (AI), which currently counts and precisely identifies six different insects: Macrolophus pygmaeus, Nesiodiocoris tenuis, Tuta absoluta as well as whiteflies, thrips and leafminers.
To date, it is the only system on the market that can differentiate between the two species of miridae. This is a considerable advantage since M. pygmaeus is a beneficial insect, while N. tenuis is considered a pest, causing major yield losses in certain crops.
Demonstrating Trap-Eye
This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of FloraCulture International.
