Sketching the next food system, one circle at a time

Robots in the field, data in the soil, humans in the loop: at a Tech & Design Meetup of the EHV Innovation Café, Circlefarming inventor Floris Schoonderbeek and WUR researcher Paul van Zoggel argued that the real innovation challenge is not automation, but designing care, autonomy, and a livable landscape.

The room did not feel like an agriculture conference. Designers, engineers, researchers, first-time visitors - hands went up in every category when moderator Charlotte Grün took a quick poll at the Innovation Café. Then came the question that landed like a stone in a glass of water: Who is in control of the food system? Farmers? Technology companies? Policy? Consumers? Industry?

The audience hesitated, split their votes, and revealed the evening’s tension before the first speaker had even finished a sip of their drink. Everyone senses the shift: farming is becoming a data problem, a machine problem, a supply chain problem. But the deeper question is human: what kind of food system are we actually trying to build?

Grün framed the conversation as a double interview with two unlikely allies. Floris Schoonderbeek, designer and inventor, founder of Circlefarming. And Paul van Zoggel, researcher at Wageningen University & Research and TU/e, translating precision agriculture into tools people can use.

“The future of farming will not be decided by machines,” the introduction promised, “but by how humans, data, and design learn to grow together.”

What followed was not a product pitch. It was a live debate about efficiency, dependence, and the uncomfortable fact that a “better” system is often harder socially, economically, and politically than a fast one.

From protest to prototype

Schoonderbeek did not arrive at farming through a traditional route. “I’m a product designer, inventor, and everything in between,” he told the audience. Three years ago, during the peak of Dutch farmer protests in The Hague, he began investigating the food system on his own.

“I thought: what do we actually eat, and where does it come from, and what is the impact on our environment?” he said. It started as curiosity, the kind designers treat as a professional method: observe, research, prototype, test. But it quickly turned into a systems question. How much land do we use? And how much of that ends up on our plates?

Schoonderbeek is explicit about what design can and cannot do. “Many transitions are… finally a social transition,” he said. “We know what we have to do technically.”

That line became a thread through the evening: technology is not the bottleneck. Adoption is.

Regenerative farming needs more hands. Or different machines

Van Zoggel’s origin story mirrored Schoonderbeek’s, but through a different doorway. He began his career in media, IT, and computer games, and studied at an art academy in Utrecht. Then he lived in Romania, where he says his children discovered what food could taste like. Returning to the Netherlands triggered the question that pulled him into agriculture: could digital tools help rebuild quality?

At WUR, he has spent a decade developing regenerative approaches, including strip cropping. The principle sounds deceptively simple: more variation in the field, fewer chemicals, healthier soil. But there’s a catch.

“If we want to create sustainable food,” he explained, “we need more variation in the fields, actually, but then we also need more hands to take care of it.” The machines built for industrial farming are optimized for monoculture: big, fast, cheap. Diversity demands precision and precision demands either labor or smarter tools.

Grün offered a metaphor for regenerative farming that the room immediately adopted: borrowing a ladder from your neighbor and returning it cleaner than you received it. Van Zoggel translated this into the field: conventional farming often removes nutrients and compensates by adding external inputs; regenerative farming aims to build soil quality so the system can produce from within.

Circlefarming: low-tech certainty, high-tech possibilities

Circlefarming, the project Schoonderbeek and Van Zoggel are now co-developing, is built around an arresting idea: a long, rotating arm anchored to a fixed point, sweeping a perfect circle across the field.

The circle is not the point, Schoonderbeek insisted. The point is what the arm enables: predictable positioning, extreme precision, and a hybrid of old tools and new technology. “We believe in people, existing tools, and new technology,” he said. “In that mix, we think regenerative farming… is possible.”

© circlefarming

His critique of many agricultural robots is blunt: self-driving systems are expensive and unstable because they must constantly sense, decide, and correct. A fixed center point changes the equation. “We know always exactly where we are,” he said. That stability makes it easier to deploy advanced techniques, including laser weeding, without betting everything on autonomy.

Then Schoonderbeek pivoted from engineering to psychology. On another farm, he had asked why vegetable beds were shaped organically, not in strict rectangles. The farmer’s answer stuck: walking in curves changes the mind; it feels like a better environment to work in. For Schoonderbeek, that mattered as much as crop yield.

“The question I always get: what about the corners?” he said, anticipating the classic efficiency objection. But he claims the system can “win the space” by eliminating tractor tracks within the circle and creating edges that can be returned to nature or to people.

What truly fascinated him was not the circle itself, but “what happens in between the circles”: the potential to redesign the landscape, and perhaps soften the historic conflict between city and countryside.

The migrant in the robot: dependence as the hidden risk

At one point, Van Zoggel showed an AI-generated image of the “future farm”: humans and robots working under a bright sky, a windmill in the background. Then he asked the audience a provocative question: who is the migrant in this picture?

ChatGPT, he said, saw none.

Van Zoggel saw three: the human (migration is a constant in history), the robot (built somewhere else), and the windmill, a technology that existed in Persia long before it became Dutch iconography. The punchline wasn’t about trivia. It was about dependence.

“Great, all these technologies,” he said, “but we become very dependent.” Farmers already feel it: more software, more suppliers, fewer tools they can fix themselves. He posed a geopolitical scenario without drama: what happens if the machines that run food production rely on foreign hardware and a remote software switch?

In a region “between Delft, Eindhoven and Wageningen,” he argued, the Netherlands should be able to build its own agricultural machines, and keep control close to the farmer and the community.

The adoption problem: identity, not capability

Even regenerative communities can resist new technology, Van Zoggel admitted. Many people choose regenerative farming because they want to feel connected to soil, food, and community, and they suspect sensors and robotics threaten that identity. “We think this new technology can help us to be connected,” he said, “but that’s also our kind of social challenge: how can we introduce these new technologies in the regenerative community?”

That is where Circlefarming positions itself: not as “robots replacing farmers,” but as tools empowering hands in the field. This is why Van Zoggel discussed “digital twins” built with smartphones: a way for smaller, connected farms to share insights without turning agriculture into a black box controlled by platforms.

And it’s why Schoonderbeek floated a different economic model: not selling machines outright, but leasing them, while farmers keep ownership of simpler tools. A “library of tools,” he called it: use rather than possess.

The missing payer in the system

Business questions dominated the Q&A: total cost of ownership, scalability, productivity comparisons. Schoonderbeek’s honest answer: the numbers are coming, but this year is “the year of the numbers.”

Van Zoggel supplied a stark reference point from earlier strip-cropping calculations: costs could triple at the farm level, yet the retail price of fries suggests there is room in the chain. The problem is not theoretical affordability. The problem is where value is captured, and who pays for extra effort.

“The system is broken because nobody pays for the extra effort,” Van Zoggel said. Farmers want to change, but “they can’t send the bill anywhere.” A Rijkswaterstaat employee in the audience reframed it as a value stack: food, biodiversity, water retention, social value, and health. Why are ministries still compartmentalized, each funding only its own slice?

Van Zoggel’s answer was pragmatic: national focus still defaults to production farming. But decentralization could open doors if regions can demonstrate integrated projects, real places where the dialogue becomes unavoidable.

Effectiveness before efficiency

As the evening closed, a regular attendee delivered a summary that sounded like a thesis statement for the entire meetup. We talk too quickly about efficiency, he argued, without first agreeing on effectiveness. “If you’re very efficient, you can be doing the wrong things in a very good way,” he said. “And that’s… what we’re doing at the moment.”

He added another distinction: knowledge is not the same as wisdom. Wisdom is how you apply knowledge and how you introduce a new paradigm without pretending it will fit neatly inside the old one.

Circlefarming is not simply a clever machine. It is an attempt to design a farming system that remains humane, accessible, regenerative, and resilient against the dependencies quietly creeping into the food chain.

The circle, it turns out, may be less a shape than a statement: farming is not a linear production line. It is a learning ecosystem with soil, community, technology, and culture. And the question is not whether robots will arrive, but whether we can still recognize ourselves when they do.