Salads grown by automata under artificial lights: on the outskirts of Japanese cities, automatic vegetable factories emerge from the earth to fill the gaps in a crowded countryside and the mercy of repeated natural disasters.
It is an ordinary building in the middle of an industrial area full of research, between Kyoto and Osaka, in western Japan. Nothing from the outside suggests that some 11 million feet of lettuce per year (30,000 shipped per day) grow in these premises of the Spread company with only 25 employees.
Without pesticides but with nutrients
Everything is played out behind a window, in a sanitized room, full of very large, long and wide shelves. Automata are transplanting salads from one space to another, day length. As they grow, they reach locations where the conditions of brightness, temperature, humidity, are adapted to the stage of their growth. This, without pesticide or soil, but with water enriched with nutrients.
Along with Denmark, Japan has for decades been a pioneer in the painstaking development of vegetable factories in artificial light. Gloves like Panasonic, Toshiba, TDK or Fujitsu have risked it, with more or less success, by converting semiconductor production lines into vertical trusses and by designing lights, sensors and other dedicated technologies.
No loss
The fact remains that Spread, of which the parent company is the origin of a fruit and vegetable logistics firm, is one of the few to have made the business profitable. At first, the salads were struggling to sell, but it was relatively easy to create a good brand image to attract the customer, because we can produce the same quality at the same price throughout the year, explains Shinji Inada, the boss of the company.
The secret ? We have little waste and the products, which are easily found in supermarkets in Kyoto but also in Tokyo, keep for a long time. It took years to develop this automatic system.
In another older Spread factory in Kyoto, from which 21,000 feet per day come out, some 50 employees move the plants, a hard task, recognizes an employee. Mr. Inada said he had questioned the ecological relevance of such systems before launching the activity, but other reasons also motivated him.
Strawberries, tomatoes
With the shortage of labor, the low profitability of the agricultural sector and the decline in production, I felt the need for a new production system, he said. The average age of Japanese farmers is 67 years.
It is true that we use more energy compared to a culture in the sun, but we have on the other hand a greater productivity equal area, he justifies. The seasons don’t count: on a vertical farm, the same kind of salad is produced eight times a year. As for the quantity of water, 98% reuse in a closed circuit, it is minimal compared to the volume used in traditional culture.
With all these tips, I believe that we are contributing to sustainable agriculture for our society, says the boss. Spread begins to reproduce the same diagram elsewhere in Japan, to bring the place of production closer to the place of consumption: a factory is under construction Narita, near Tokyo, in Chiba prefecture, damaged this year by two powerful typhoons. Others are in the pipeline.
The foreigner is also in the crosshairs. We can easily export our production system to a very hot country or, conversely, to a cold climate, to grow salads.
With the construction of a lettuce plant of the same size (32,000 feet per day), in the prefecture of Fukushima, Mitsubishi Gas Chemical hopes to soon join Spread in this so-called smart-agri sector where remote monitoring devices are also used and drones.
At the moment, Japan has about 200 lettuce plants closed in artificial light, but most of them are small. According to the specialist firm Innoplex, there will be 400 in 2025.
Salads are the easiest to produce in these artificial conditions. However, strawberries, tomatoes and other products can also be grown in this way, with computer-controlled systems.
(Nxp / afp)
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