|
 Panasonic Corp, Fujitsu Ltd and others, seeking niche business
opportunities to offset a downturn in demand for their consumer
electronics, are touting automated greenhouses and sensor-controlled
fields that ensure constant conditions to produce high-quality
vegetables all year-round.
Fujitsu says its Akisai cloud-based farming system means users can
sit at a desk in Tokyo or even New York while tending vegetables in
Shizuoka, using a tablet to operate sprinklers, fans and heaters in
response to changes in heat and moisture tracked by sensors in
fields or greenhouses.
Companies are also converting factories into farms: Toshiba Corp is
to start growing vegetables at a former floppy disk plant near
Tokyo, while Panasonic is growing radishes and lettuce inside a
Singapore factory, and Sharp Corp is trialling an indoor strawberry
farm in Dubai.
This tech push into farming is endorsed by Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe's government, which is promoting robotics and sensors to boost
farm production and exports – essential if Japan concedes to lower
agricultural tariffs in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free
trade agreement.
Domestic demand for farming systems using information technology and
the cloud is expected to expand ninefold to 60 billion yen ($586
million) by 2020, according to market research firm Seed Planning,
as farmers fret over the impact of climate change on their crops.
Last year's summer was Japan's hottest on record, with temperatures
in Tokyo topping 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) for a
week straight in early August.
"For the past 4-5 years, vegetable prices have gone up every year
because of the heat," says Takayoshi Tanizawa, the manager of
Panasonic's greenhouse project. "Farmers are in a bind because they
can't grow summer vegetables any more. They say they've never
experienced this kind of heat before. There are also many bouts of
heavy rain. Unusual weather is becoming more and more 'normal'."
JAPANESE MODEL
While indoor farming has taken off in the United States and Europe,
particularly in the Netherlands, those systems are designed more for
a colder climate and are only equipped with heating, rather than
cooling systems. In Japan, rising electricity costs mean that
energy-intensive methods, such as blasting out air conditioning,
aren't a cost-effective solution.
"The Japanese model that deals with high temperatures and humidity
is more appropriate for Japan and other Asian countries," says
Yasufumi Miwa, an agricultural specialist at the Japan Research
Institute.
Panasonic has developed a "passive", low-energy greenhouse that uses
sensor-activated fans, sprinklers and curtains instead of air
conditioning to keep heat and humidity at a constant - whether it's
January or July. Fujitsu similarly offers solar-powered posts
equipped with thermometers, humidity sensors and cameras for
farmers' fields.
Greenhouses cover 11 percent of the land used to cultivate
vegetables in Japan, but account for 15 percent of total output, or
165 billion yen ($1.6 billion), and farmers who use them can have
double the revenue of those who use open fields as they more
consistently produce high-quality vegetables.
Although Panasonic's greenhouses aren't cheap, at 55 million yen
($540,000) for a set of ten, the company says the cost can be
recouped within seven years, and estimates it is half the price of a
system using air conditioning. A constant temperature can double
harvests to eight a year, says Panasonic, which aims to sell 1,000
of its greenhouses by the year ending March 2017 and hopes the
system will eventually be used to produce a tenth of Japan's spinach
output, or 26,000 tons.
[to top of second column] |
High-tech systems that can produce higher-quality premium vegetables
could give Japanese farmers the competitive edge they will need if
the country joins the TPP, the free trade agreement it's negotiating
with 11 other countries.
"It's like semiconductors ... the low-cost ones have to be sold at
high-volume to keep costs low, whereas Japan's semiconductor
industry is about developing the next generation and to add value,"
said Takeshi Sudo, senior vice president of innovative business
development at Fujitsu.
YOUNG BLOOD
Low on effort and high on tech, Fujitsu's Akisai system is designed
to attract young blood into a sector where the average Japanese
farmer is 66 years old. Using big data to analyze climate against
output over a year can help newcomers understand what conditions are
ideal: one test user increased his revenue by 30 percent and used
nearly one-third less fertilizer.
Fujitsu says it has around 200 customers for the Akisai system which
it launched in 2012, including supermarket retailer Aeon Co Ltd,
which uses it to grow and time the distribution of perfectly ripe
vegetables from 15 farms straight to stores. It aims to reap 15
billion yen ($150 million) in revenue by the year to end-March 2016.
And the system hasn't ignored the meat industry either.
As Japan's government hopes to expand beef exports fivefold by 2020,
Fujitsu has come up with an anklet for heifers - which could be the
world's first wearable for cows.
The Gyuho, or 'cow step', pedometer can pinpoint when a heifer is
most fertile based on how much she walks around. The farmer is sent
an email alert so he can rush to artificially inseminate the cow and
have a higher chance of meeting the target of one calf per year - a
big potential improvement when a head of cattle can fetch up to
$5,000 at auction.
"Before, you'd either have to get on top of the cow and see if she
objected or not, or else check the floor to see if there were a lot
of hoofprints," said Hiroshi Kadomatsu, a beef farmer in Miyazaki
prefecture in southern Japan.
"I'm not quite at 100 percent success rate with Gyuho yet, but it's
certainly a lot better than before."
(Editing by Ian Geoghegan)
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright
2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
