Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news!

Subscribe I am already a subscriber

You are using software which is blocking our advertisements (adblocker).

As we provide the news for free, we are relying on revenues from our banners. So please disable your adblocker and reload the page to continue using this site.
Thanks!

Click here for a guide on disabling your adblocker.

Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news!

Subscribe I am already a subscriber

Japan: Fine tuning the art of high-tech spinach farming

In what was once a semiconductor plant, Fujitsu is growing lettuce. Instead of sunlight, Sharp uses LED lamps to feed its lab-grown strawberries. And in a factory that used to crank out floppy discs, Toshiba is growing endives. Welcome to the next generation of high-tech farmhands.

Buoyed by the Japanese government's drive to replace ageing farmers and improve farm productivity, Japan's tech giants are learning new tricks as they expand into agriculture. Yet for farmers like Norimitsu Morishita, the new high-tech approaches are mostly just high-tech gimmicks.

After the 2011 nuclear disaster devastated spinach farmers further up north, Morishita who together with his brother, oversees production and distribution on several farms north of Tokyo, began growing the vegetable. To boost productivity, Morishita began looking in to high-tech technology but found most of the methods too expensive.

Click here to read the complete article at bloomberg.com.
Publication date: