Tomatoes and strawberries are difficult to grow in hot and humid subtropical regions. Panasonic and several other companies took on the challenge of growing delicious tomatoes and strawberries in the extreme environment of Ishigaki Island, located in a subtropical region.
Tech companies diving into the greenhouse market
Only recently, South Korean tech giant LG announced the launch of their home-growing vegetable fridge. It can be considered a baby step when looking at the developments major Asian tech companies made in the horticulture industry earlier, like the Chinese giant Tencent participating in the Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge, Samsung launching greenhouse LEDs, and major companies like Mitsubishi growing tomatoes.
One of the companies that has been active in horticulture over a longer period, is Panasonic. "The number of people engaged in agriculture in Japan is decreasing, and the country's elderly population is rapidly increasing. Agricultural high-tech is one of the measures that are seen as a solution to these problems", the Japanese multinational declared earlier, and also anounced a more broad motivation: "With global climate change and a declining population of growers, sustainable agriculture and food security are needed. Panasonic uses the technologies created for home appliances to produce agricultural products, and a distribution system that ensures the safe, secure, and appropriate supply of products in a timely manner."
They explain their desire to participate in a wide range of fields, from open-field cultivation and greenhouse horticulture to plant factories, as well as barns and livestock barns. "We want to provide solutions to solve on-site problems, such as ICT / IoT systems and services for agricultural equipment, facilities and engineering."
Joining in the vegetable industry
So what does this look like? A couple of years ago Panasonic announced their participation in the vegetable industry. The Japanese multinational is well-known for their electronics but announced in 2013 to both join in the high tech vertical farming as well as the greenhouse industry. Via the subsidiary PFSAP (Panasonic Factory Solutions Asia Pacific) they supplied their urban farming solutions to a 248 square meter farm in Singapore, an operation that has expanded to over 1,200 square meters ever since.
Back in 2014 they also announced to enter the greenhouse business with a Passive Greenhouse and a system that, based on their environmental control systems for buildings, controls the climate in the greenhouse. The system was shown at spinach growing company Tomita Farm.
Almost four years ago, the tech giant took another remarkable step. They announced that they were working on a Tomato Harvesting Robot and last year they showed the progress. "The idea is to leave harvesting work, which accounts for 20% of all agricultural work, to robots in order to increase efficiency. Advanced farms are already appearing that have put robots to work and are developing technology and know-how", they said.
As Mr. Toshima says, "Without limiting ourselves to agriculture, we want to develop robots that help people all over the world, and robots that make people happy. We hope that the elemental technologies that are accumulated in our Tomato Harvesting Robot will be applied to robots in a wide range of fields."
Vegetable growing
Now Panasonic also shows how they are active in growing itself. A platform was created by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries under the name Field for Knowledge Integration and Innovation and Panasonic participates in it.
In a video, the challenges of chefs on the Japanese island of Ishigaki are explained: they want a year-round supply of tomatoes - something that's difficult under the conditions on the island and something that appeals to the original motives of Panasonic: supplying vegetables under difficult conditions, in a hot and humid area where quite often typhoons take place. "They are employing the latest technology to carry out a project under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries", they explain.
The consortium developed a trial center to help the growers overcome the challenges. To work with the danger of typhoons, they based the shape of the greenhouse on the passive greenhouse that Panasonic developed earlier. And more techniques developed by Panasonic are being used, for example the climate control Smart Saien's Cloud, the climate control system they developed to control temperature and humidity. With Cultivation Navi they log records and with sensors they measure the photosynthesis in the crop.
And that's not all. The Panasonic team explains how they created infrared-absorbing curtains by taking a hint from plasma TV tech and took the technique they developed to cool the city during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic games for developing mist sprayers.
Advances in this technology will enable local production and consumption of fruits and vegetables in marginal environments on the planet, which will also contribute toward achieving the SDGs.