Category Archives: Food & Agriculture

Tottori University, Corporation Fuji Electric, a lighting apparatus maker based at Iwami town, Tottori prefecture, and a research group organized by the Tottori Prefectural Government have recently found out that strawberry plants bore larger berries when they were continuously irradiated with far-red light for three hours per day after sunset. The irradiation was effective for increasing a harvest ratio of large and larger-sized strawberries per plant by 10 percent as well as an output of those strawberries by 30 percent. The Tottori Prefectural Government plans to spread uses of this lightning technology among strawberry producers, expecting the irradiation of the far-red light will be most effective particularly in areas with … Continue reading →

The Graduate University for Advanced Studies or SOKENDAI, based at Hayama town, Kanagawa prefecture, has launched a new project to develop a device for scaring off harmful crows from farming areas by making them mistake artificial “crows’ conversation” for cries of wild crows with a crow-shaped drone of a small unmanned aerial vehicle. The flying crow-shaped drone exchanges “artificial conversations” with a robot crow staying on the land. The conversations, which are recorded with sounds of crows’ cries produced by artificial intelligence (AI), are replayed through a built-in speaker of the stuffed-crow robot. Built-in AIs of the drone and the crow robot can also distinguish cries of wild crows. And … Continue reading →

“Bonsai” or tray planting, which had been classified into a field of hobbies for aged men, has gained a considerable reputation as a global brand mostly popular among a number of overseas people. Kawaguchi city in Saitama prefecture is one of the biggest production areas of garden plants in Japan, which has a 400-year long history. The city is well known as “a town of Bonsai” to lots of Bonsai lovers in foreign countries. Many international buyers directly visit the city to purchase various kinds of Bonsai. Some of Bonsai tree growers in Kawaguchi are shipping more than a half of their products to overseas markets. The World Bonsai Convention … Continue reading →

NoshoNavi Co., Ltd., established by agricultural corporations and farm-related organizations at Chuo-ku, Tokyo, will begin next April to sponsor a common “platform for Nosho (literally, professional farmers),” which is a network host of several providers of cloud computing service respectively operated by a farm machinery manufacturer and computer firms, in cooperation with ZEN-NOH (National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations), agricultural cooperatives’ national business organization. It will be possible for farmers and their organizations throughout the country to make access to information and data provided by those cloud systems through the common platform. The NoshoNavi expects some hundred farmers and agricultural corporations to be users of the platform for the time … Continue reading →