We built it without Brussels

One morning in June 2026, two screens sit side by side. On one, the FairGrow dashboard is running: hourly soil moisture from our own test setup, where something is actually growing, yesterday's Sentinel-2 image, tomorrow's irrigation advice. Alongside it is the schedule for the launch and for certifying the sensors. On the other screen is an application form for European innovation funding. One of the boxes to tick: we have not started yet.

That month we looked seriously at whether European funding was a fit for FairGrow. We went through the EIC Accelerator, Horizon Europe Cluster 6 with the FARM2FORK call for 2027, the Dutch WBSO scheme and the regional routes. The answer was no in every case, and not because we had a weak plan. The answer was no for structural reasons, and those are more interesting than our own disappointment.

The only instrument left standing was Dutch, not European: the DHI scheme run by RVO, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, for demonstration projects abroad. This piece is about why that is, and why in the end we are glad we did not wait.

1. Brussels funds the gap, not the result

The entire Horizon edifice rests on one principle: additionality. Grants may only go to work that would not happen without them. That sounds reasonable, and the European Commission will rightly say that taxpayers' money is not meant to pay for something the market already pays for. It is the safeguard against companies rebranding their ongoing development as a project and sending the bill to Brussels.

For FairGrow, this was the first door to close. The platform runs, the sensors send data from our own test setups, the satellite layer works and the advisory layer gives advice. It has been proven to work at small scale. What still needs to happen, testing on real plots with real growers, getting the sensors through certification and preparing the launch, is no longer research and therefore does not count as a fundable gap. The most we could have done was construct a gap, a component we would deliberately leave unbuilt so we could apply for funding for it. That is exactly the inversion the system invites, and we chose not to play along.

2. The TRL ladder is an academic instrument

Brussels measures innovation on a scale of nine rungs, the Technology Readiness Levels. Rung 1 is an idea on paper, rung 9 is a product operating in the market. The scale comes from the space industry, where it works very well.

In the European funding system, that scale has become a sorting machine. Research institutions occupy TRL 3 to 6, from laboratory test to demonstration in a relevant environment. That is where the bulk of the Horizon money sits and what the programmes are built around. Anyone higher up is told by Brussels that they are in the valley of death, the phase between prototype and market where companies traditionally fail. The EIC Accelerator was designed for that stage.

The Commission will say this is a deliberate division of labour: fundamental and applied research for Horizon, breakthrough technology for the EIC and the rest for the market. Except that the EIC Accelerator demands a scientific breakthrough and unicorn-scale ambition, and the success rate is roughly 5%. A healthy SME at TRL 8, with a working prototype proven at small scale that now wants to go to real plots, has no breakthrough to offer and has no wish to become a unicorn. It wants customers. For that company there is no rung on the entire ladder that fits: too far along for Horizon, too modest for the EIC. It falls between two stools, neither of which was put there for it.

3. The lead time is incompatible with running a business

Anyone who submits a Horizon application waits twelve to twenty-four months for the first euro. First a short proposal, then a full proposal, then assessment by a jury, then negotiations over the grant agreement and only then money. The Commission will say that diligence takes time and that competitive evaluation simply needs rounds. That is true.

In that time, an entrepreneur finishes the remaining research on their own, opens two markets and ships three versions. For us, that same period looks like this: the prototype has been proven at small scale, the platform is ready in 57 languages, the sensors are going through certification and we are looking for the first parties to test on real plots. In a grant application, each of those steps would have been called a work package, with a start date somewhere in 2027.

And here is the second catch. The form asks you to tick a box saying you have not started yet. Keep building while you wait, and you have disqualified yourself. So the instrument does not just ask for patience, it asks you to stand still. For a company working towards a launch, standing still is not an option, which means you effectively have to choose between your product and your application.

4. The consortium requirement selects for network, not quality

Horizon Europe Cluster 6, which covers agriculture and food, does not fund companies but consortia. An application for the FARM2FORK call of 2027 wants six to ten partners from several member states, a university as scientific anchor and a multi-actor approach in which growers, advisors and researchers work together. The reasoning behind it is defensible: European money should encourage European cooperation, and knowledge should circulate between member states rather than stay stuck in one company.

The effect is that the money is practically reserved for those already on the Brussels carousel. If you took part in the last call, you already know your partners for the next one. If you never have, you must build in a few months a network others spent ten years assembling. The evaluation criteria make that explicit: a coordinator without Horizon experience scores lower on implementation, regardless of what they have built.

An industry has grown up around that threshold. Grant consultancies write the application, bring the partners together and, on a success-fee basis, take a share of money that was meant for innovation. That is not a scandal; it is a logical response to a market the Commission itself created. But it does mean that part of every euro awarded never reaches research or product. For FairGrow the maths was simple: a year of building a consortium and paying a consultancy to write an application for work we had already done. We politely declined.

5. State aid rules forbid exactly what you need

The last door is the most principled one. The European Commission may not fund market-ready products, because that would distort competition. State aid to one company disadvantages the companies that do without it, and the Commission guards that prohibition for good reason: it is the same rule that stops a member state from buying its own industry out of the market with subsidies.

The irony is that the rule excludes precisely the phase that matters to a grower. Research into better soil moisture measurement may be funded. A prototype may be funded. But once a cooperative in Kazakhstan or a grower in Zeeland actually starts using the platform, and certification and rollout start to cost money, the work counts as commercial by definition and is off-limits. The phase in which innovation delivers something for the people it was meant for is the one Europe is not allowed to pay for.

What remains are national instruments, and they come closer, but not close enough. The Dutch WBSO scheme reimburses part of the wage costs of developers on a Dutch payroll. We have those, and much of the work happens here, but our team works closely with colleagues abroad. A clean WBSO split of who spent which hour on which component creates so much administration that the scheme becomes unworkable for us. The MIT scheme, a Dutch regional instrument, requires a second SME partner in its R&D collaboration variant and carries the same incentive-effect requirement: the work must not have started. For a company with a working prototype, that is the same wall as in Brussels, only lower. The Dutch DHI scheme pays only for a demonstration project abroad, at most half of it and with a ceiling. So it does not fund certification or the launch itself, only a single showcase with a single customer outside the Netherlands.

So The Hague does not work either, at least not for the step we now have to take. The European story about SMEs as the engine of innovation is in practice passed down to the member states, and their instruments run around the real work instead of through it.

The conclusion: a research funder that talks like an investor

What we do instead

We built it. With our own money, on our own servers in a Dutch data centre, with algorithms we develop ourselves and whose intellectual property stays under Dutch law. That is not a heroic tale; it is the logical choice for a company that has been processing data for 27 years and is used to simply getting the technical work done. It says so on our commitment page too: we would rather build something useful than watch the change from the sidelines.

We start small. First prove that it works at small scale, and that is done. Now we are looking for growers, cooperatives and test farms where we can test on real plots, while the sensors go through certification. Then launch with the first growers, and earn the next step from there. That is slower than a consortium of ten partners with a grant in hand. It is also more honest, because every expansion will be paid for by someone who uses the platform and gets something out of it. A grower who adjusts their irrigation based on what they see is a better judge than a jury in Brussels.

We would rather take the next step with partners from the market. Not with parties that watch from the sidelines, but with parties that bring something to the table: knowledge, network, plots, customers. Anyone who joins shares in the result. It is that simple.

That can be a grower on whose real plots we test and sharpen the process together. A distributor that embraces our technology and benefits from it directly within its own network: first access for its growers, its own environment in the language of its customers. Or a cooperative that signs a collective deal: one agreement for all members, with a say in what gets built next. You know the growers and the crops; we have the platform and the data.

Cooperatives have already shown they are willing to do this. When CZAV and CAV Agrotheek invested in sensor company Farm21 in November 2021, they did so not as a grant provider but as a party that wanted to roll the product out to its own members. The model worked. The technology has moved on since then. In sensors, data availability and functionality, FairGrow is a generation ahead today. Join now and you are not making the first move but the next one.

Brussels cannot fill that role of rollout partner. It is exactly the role we are offering you.

What you see here is not the result of a grant process. FairGrow was built in one year by an SME from Apeldoorn. That was only possible because of 27 years of EasyData underneath it: programming, connecting data and analysing data. Self-funded, without state support, with nerve and entrepreneurial spirit. The platform is running and the data is flowing. What is needed now are partners with the same entrepreneurial mindset: decision-makers who do not wait for the next funding round, but get moving now.

Source for the reference to Farm21: Boerderij, CZAV and CAV invest over 1 million in start-up Farm21 and Computable, 24 November 2021. The mechanisms are described as we encountered them in June 2026 in the rules of the EIC Accelerator, Horizon Europe Cluster 6, the Dutch WBSO scheme and the Dutch DHI scheme run by RVO.