Interview Saskia van Pelt
The early days with Saskia van Pelt
This year, Weather Impact celebrates its 10-year anniversary! To mark the occasion, we reflect on the last ten years and speak to both former and current colleagues who helped shape the company into what it is today.
For this interview, we talked to Saskia van Pelt, the first employee at Weather impact. As we celebrate the ten-year anniversary for the organisation, we met Saskia at her lovely home in Almen, where nestled among open farmlands, she now lives with her family, some goats, chickens and ponies.
Starting small
Back in 2014, I was working on my PhD and looking for another job when Gerrit Hiemstra, co-founder of Weather Impact reached out to me and invited me for a meeting. I met with him without knowing the exact purpose of the meeting. When we met, he explained that he planned to start a company with Arnold Lobbrecht and that they were looking for someone like me to help them. The timing was perfect, and it sounded like a good opportunity, as I was considering starting my own business.
I started to work in the building of HydroLogic (also owned by Arnold), in a small office at the top floor. Starting a company requires a lot of groundwork, such as opening a bank account, setting up a website and building a network.
Our first project was with an insurance company in Zurich, in collaboration with HydroLogic. With limited available data and experience, we worked hard to deliver the required product. It was quite a challenge, but it proved to be a valuable experience.
Building a vision
In the initial phase, Weather Impact’s vision was to help multinationals prepare for a changing climate and better forecast extreme weather conditions. We also engaged with Dutch municipalities to offer courses about weather and climate.
Then the Geodata for Agriculture and Water (G4AW) projects began. This programme, initiated by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and executed by the Netherlands Space Office, led to a meeting with someone from SoilCares. That connection sparked our first G4AW project in Kenya, ‘CropMon‘. Together with our partners, we developed an information service for farmers, sending them SMS messages with weather updates, crop monitoring information, and farming advisories to improve their yield. Over 190,000 individual farm households were impacted by the service during the project, which was a great achievement! More G4AW projects followed, which helped Weather Impact to grow even more.
Memorable moments
I travelled to quite a few African countries and each trip was special and memorable. One memorable experience was during a safari tour in South Africa with Leanne Reichard (a colleague from HydroLogic). We had to be cautious of the elephants, and as the sun started to set and it began to get dark, an elephant blocked our exit gate. We turned around and rushed to one of the other exit gates, hoping to make it before it closed. Suddenly, a huge angry bull appeared near our vehicle! We were terrified, but fortunately, we managed to get away.
Another memorable trip was with Gerrit when we flew to Kenya together. He is quite well-known in the Netherlands as the weather presenter for the NOS. A flight attendant approached us and arranged for us to have more comfortable seats, and even invited us to visit the cockpit! That’s not very common anymore, so we felt quite special. The pilots took selfies with Gerrit, but the landing itself was rough and bumpy – I guess Gerrit made the pilots nervous!
I am truly thankful for my years at Weather Impact, and I continue to follow their work and projects with great interest.
