TOKYO, Jan. 5 — Can agricultural produce be mass produced in a standardized process like industrial products?
It has been believed that farm products — whose yield and quality are affected by such factors as weather, temperatures and soil — are different from industrial goods.
A company in Tokyo challenged such conventional wisdom by developing a new technology of controlling more than 20 environmental factors including temperatures and the amount of light in a fully-enclosed setting to allow harvesting of the same vegetables any time of the year.
The vegetable factory, separated by enclosed shelving units, was developed by PLANTX, a company in Tokyo’s Koto Ward.
It can produce yields roughly five times that of the conventional plant factories with artificial lighting. It can also be adjusted to cultivate different types of vegetables.
The firm plans to start selling the product across the country this year.
Most of the workers at PLANTX, including its founder, are engineers.
The firm has succeeded in creating — in completely closed units — an environment that brings out the full potential of plants to realize high yield and high quality.
Strictly controlled and optimized environment accelerates the pace of growth. A head of lettuce, for example, grows to 100 grams of fresh weight in about 20 days.
About 100 lettuce heads can be cultivated in one unit, achieving a yield rate of more than 90 percent. Lettuce plants in the unit grow at the same rate and can be harvested all at once.
In the units, the amount of water needed is reduced by making it flow like a stream at a depth of 3 millimeters over the roots of the plants.
Through this method, the amount of water necessary to produce 100 g of lettuce can be reduced by 12 liters compared with open-field cultivation.
Junya Uramoto, PLANTX’s executive officer, says, “It is technically possible to grow almost any crop,” such as rice, strawberries, tomatoes, daikon radish and green onions.
Meanwhile, currently, market prices for farm produce other than lettuce do not meet the costs of production at the vegetable factory.
The firm is working on trials to reduce production costs.
United Super Markets Holdings Inc., a company which has Maruetsu, a major supermarket chain in the Tokyo metropolitan area, as its subsidiary, introduced PLANTX’s vegetable factory three years ago and started cultivation.
Around 5,000 heads of lettuce are produced every day and are put on sale at Maruetsu stores and other places a day after they are harvested.
In the future, PLANTX hopes to serve as a complement by cultivating items which have become difficult to be grown outdoors due to extreme weather events such as heat waves and droughts.
The firm also thinks that the facility can be utilized to accelerate development of new varieties or achieve stable production of seedlings.
A fully-enclosed plant factory in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, developed by PLANTX, offers a completely-controlled environment to achieve energy-saving cultivation of agricultural products.