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KYOTO, JAPAN: Spread Develops Technology For Mass Production of Pesticide-Free Strawberry In Vertical Farms
Spread Co., Ltd. (HQ: Kyoto, Japan; CEO: Shinji Inada, hereinafter “Spread”) succeeded in developing the technology for mass production of pesticide-free, high-quality strawberries in vertical farms using artificial lighting
Kyoto, Japan. — Spread Co., Ltd. (HQ: Kyoto, Japan; CEO: Shinji Inada, hereinafter “Spread”) succeeded in developing the technology for mass production of pesticide-free, high-quality strawberries in vertical farms using artificial lighting.
This was made possible by applying Spread’s cultivation know-how to strawberry production.
The technologies include proprietary environmental control, stable indoor pollination, and pesticide-free, clean cultivation.
Spread is considering the deployment of strawberry vertical farms in Japan and overseas, targeting North America, Europe, and Asia.
Spread will also work on product design and a vertically farmed strawberry brand.
DEMAND AND CHALLENGES
Strawberries are globally in high demand, with both yields and production value on the rise. *1 In particular, Japanese strawberries are sought after, which is shown by the steady increase in exports. *2 However, strawberry production is known for heavy pesticide use, and significant food miles.
According to USDA’s data, on average, strawberries in USA carry the residue of 7.8 different pesticides, compared to 2.2 for other crops *3, while over 90% of all strawberries are produced in California. *4
SPREAD’S SOLUTION
Until now vertical farmers have struggled to ensure stable production, with challenges in indoor pollination and high cost.
Spread is able to achieve a year-round stable harvest of pesticide-free strawberries indoors through proprietary environmental control technologies, and stable indoor pollination.
Applying them to large-scale production and adding automation will allow for a move towards accessible prices.
SPREAD’S MISSION
Spread’s strawberries are a part of a larger “Global Food Infrastructure” concept that imagines a world where everyone has free access to fresh and nutritious produce.
CEO Shinji Inada comments “Mass production technology of delicious, pesticide-free strawberries is an important step towards a sustainable society where future generations can live with peace of mind.”
Recognizing the need to feed the Earth, Spread is widening its product range by working on grains, mushrooms, fruits, and more.
*1 FAO Database “World’s Strawberry Yield and Gross Production Value” 2019
*2 JETRO “Nihonsan Shokuzai Pikkuappu Ichigo” [Highlighted Japanese
Ingredient: Strawberry]
*3 EWG “Dirty Dozen Strawberries” 2020
*4 Samtani et al. “The Status and Future of the Strawberry Industry in the United States” American Society for Horticultural Science, 31 Jan 2019
Entrepreneurs See Hydroponics As Farming Solution In Libya
Conventional Agriculture Struggles In Mostly-Desert North African Country
Conventional Agriculture Struggles
In Mostly-Desert North African Country.
11/04/2021
TRIPOLI--Under a yellow tarpaulin stretched over an arched metal frame, Siraj Bechiya and his partner inspect their hydroponically-grown lettuce, pioneers of the method in mostly-desert Libya where conventional agriculture struggles.
Zip ties, punctured plastic cups as pots and PVC tubing bought in DIY shops hold the precious crops at “Green Paradise” — so dubbed by the two young Libyan entrepreneurs spearheading the project.
But the ad hoc nature of the materials hasn’t stopped the plants from thriving, their long white roots nourished by water rich with nutrients and oxygen.
Bechiya and his partner, Mounir, have been working tirelessly on their project for months in the small town of Qouwea, 40 kilometres east of the capital Tripoli, erecting a tunnel-shaped greenhouse surrounded by breeze-block walls on a semi-arid site.
Their hope is to demystify hydroponic farming, which “guarantees a good yield in small spaces”, uses little water and doesn’t need pesticides, 20-year-old Bechiya said.
Soilless farming has gained ground in many countries but is still in its infancy in Libya.
But in a country whose territory is 90 percent arid desert, the method could offer a path toward more food self-sufficiency, Bechiya believes.
Challenges to farming
Agriculture remains a marginal sector in Libya, where the economy is dominated by hydrocarbons, the country boasting the most abundant oil reserves in Africa.
Arable land barely makes up three percent of Libya’s territory and is under threat, as rapid urbanisation eats up the fertile strip along the Mediterranean coast.
Another major challenge to farming in Libya is the lack of water where agriculture needs it most.
The Great Man-Made River — a pharaonic project realised by the toppled long-time ruler Muammar Gadhafi more than 30 years ago — carries drinking water pumped from groundwater tables in the south to the northern cities where most Libyans live.
But this resource is not infinite, and the GMMR’s network has been heavily damaged in the decade of conflict that has ravaged Libya since Kadhafi’s ouster in a 2011 NATO-backed uprising.
In the face of these challenges, Bechiya and Mounir set out to train in hydroponics two years ago in neighbouring Tunisia.
“When we came back, it was imperative that we move from theory to practice,” Bechiya said.
“We started with some vegetables in the house and we were surprised by people’s enthusiasm.”
New Techniques
In theory, hydroponics can guarantee higher yields and profits than conventional farming, which is at risk from weather, water shortages, and pollution from unregulated pesticide use.
“With more space in the greenhouse, the idea was able to take off. We will continue to develop it… and improve quality,” said Bechiya, as he measured the acidity of the water feeding his young lettuce.
“Libyan consumers don’t want produce full of pesticides anymore, but organic produce,” he added.
While not saturated with pesticides, hydroponic products, poo-pooed as bland by detractors, generally are not labeled organic.
Agronomist Abdelkafi al-Amrouni said the method “paves the way toward the introduction of new agricultural techniques in Libya” to compensate for water shortages.
There are still obstacles to widespread hydroponic use, however.
“It’s complicated and very expensive to get supplies in Libya,” even as the country tries to turn the page on a decade of chaos, Amrouni said.
Such costs could make the products ultimately prohibitively pricey.
But Bechiya is not deterred.
“You have to be patient and believe in your idea,” he said.
Lead photo: Project manager checks a plantation of hydroponically grown lettuce, in a greenhouse in the small town of Qouwea, about 40 kilometres east of Libya’s capital Tripoli. (AFP)
PODCAST: Pest Control
In this Podcast, we’re going to discuss using biological pest control or using none at all
Joe Swartz & Nick Greens | 12/11/2020
In this Podcast, we’re going to discuss using biological pest control or using none at all
Unless We Change Course, The US Agricultural System Could Collapse
“There’s no great mystery about how to halt the withering away of California’s water or Iowa’s soil”
Opinion by: Tom Philpott
26 August 2020
Our Food Supply Comes From An Environmentally
Unsustainable System That Is Going To Unravel
Picture an ideal dinner plate. If you’re like most Americans, it features a hearty portion of meat, from animals fattened on midwestern corn and soybeans, and a helping of vegetables largely trucked in from California. The unique landscapes we rely on to deliver this bounty – the twin jewels of the US food system – are locked in a state of slow-motion ecological unraveling.
California’s agricultural sector has flourished from decades of easy access to water in one of the globe’s biggest swaths of Mediterranean climate. The Sierra Nevada, the spine of mountains that runs along California’s eastern flank, captures an annual cache of snow that, when it melts, cascades into a network of government-built dams, canals, and aqueducts that deliver irrigation water to farmers in the adjoining Central Valley. In light-snow years, farmers could tap aquifers that had built up over millennia to offset the shortfall.
But the Sierra snowpack has shown an overall declining trend for decades – most dramatically during the great California drought of 2012-2016 – and it will dwindle further over the next several decades as the climate warms, a growing body of research suggests. A 2018 paper by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers articulates the alarming consensus: a “future of consistent low-to-no snowpack” for the Sierra Nevada, the irrigation jewel of our vegetable patch.
Is the way cattle are grazed the key to saving America's threatened prairies?
Even as snowmelt gushing from the mountains dwindles, the Central Valley farming behemoth gets ever more ravenous for irrigation water, switching from annual crops that can be fallowed in dry years to almond and pistachio groves, which require huge upfront investments and need to be watered every year. As a result, farm operations are increasingly resorting to tapping the water beneath them. Between 2002 and 2017, a period including two massive droughts, farmers siphoned enough water from the valley’s aquifers to fill Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain three times.
As the water vanishes, the ground settles and sinks in uneven and unpredictable ways, a phenomenon known as subsidence. By 2017, large sections of the Central Valley were sinking by as much as 2 ft a year. In addition to damaging roads, bridges, houses, sewage pipes, and pretty much all built infrastructure, subsidence snarls up the canals that carry snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada. Thus we have a vicious circle: reduced snowmelt means less water flowing through government-run irrigation channels, which pushes farmers to pump more water from underground, causing more subsidence that damages those channels and reduces their flow capacity, pushing farmers to accelerate the cycle by pumping more water from underground.
“There’s no great mystery about how to halt the withering away of California’s water or Iowa’s soil”
Seventeen hundred miles to the east, the prevailing agriculture system consumes a different but equally precious resource: soil. When white settlers seized what we now call the corn belt from indigenous inhabitants in the 19th century, they found thousands of miles of prairies and marshlands, with hundreds of species of perennial wild grasses, legumes and flowers that towered over their heads, with roots plunging just as deep into the earth, burying carbon from the atmosphere and feeding a teeming web of micro-organisms that break down and cycle nutrients. Aboveground, vast herds of bison ate their way through fields, stimulating new plant growth and recycling nutrients through their manure.
Interactions between Native Americans, plants, animals, microbes, and climate left behind a majestic store of fertile topsoil that scientists call mollisol. Even today, the US midwest boasts the largest of four major mollisol stores on the planet. Mollisols develop over millennia yet can be squandered in decades. US colonial-settler agriculture transformed this ecological niche, a landmass 1.5 times the size of California, into a factory churning out just two crops – corn and soybeans.
This kind of agriculture fouls water as a matter of course. Since corn and soybeans are planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, the vast majority of corn-belt farmland lies bare for the winter months, leaving the ground naked when storms hit. These deluges pummel bare topsoil and send it – and the agrochemicals and manure farmers apply to it – cascading off farms and into streams and creeks that flow into rivers, lakes, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. But there’s another problem with subjecting the land to the same two crops every year: loss of the region’s precious black topsoil. According to research by the soil scientist Rick Cruse, Iowa – and much of the surrounding corn belt – is losing soil at a rate 16 times the pace of natural replenishment.
Again, climate change is a driver. Today’s farmers encounter a weather regime radically different from that of their grandparents: more intense off-season storms, and thus ever-heavier pressure on the soil. If global greenhouse gases continue rising, the region faces a 40% increase in precipitation by the late 21st century, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment. The soil that makes one of the globe’s most important growing regions so productive is vanishing before our eyes, degrading a crucial food production region at the very time when climate change and global population growth call for building resilience.
Extreme weather just devastated 10m acres in the midwest. Expect more of this | Art Cullen
There’s no great mystery about how to halt the withering away of California’s water or Iowa’s soil. California needs to shrink its agricultural footprint to match the scale of its water resources, which means other regions of the US should ramp up their own fruit and vegetable production to make up the difference. In the corn belt, US federal farm policy should stop paying farmers to overproduce corn and soybeans, and instead push them to diversify their plantings and keep their land covered all winter – practices known to maintain high levels of production while also preserving soil, decreasing water pollution and slashing the need for pesticides and fertilizers.
Reduced demand for agrichemicals, however, pinches the bottom line of the agrichemical behemoths, and a turn from corn-and-soybean dominance will dent profits for the meat companies that rely on cheap, overproduced feed. These companies divert a share of their income into lobbying and campaign finance, and their interests shape US farm policy. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Just as creating a sane climate policy requires the rise of a social movement to negate the power of the fossil fuel lobby, a better agricultural regime will require a direct political challenge to big agribusiness.
Climate justice and food justice are, in fact, the same fight – the struggle to beat back corporate dominance and make the world livable for everyone.
Tom Philpott is the agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones and the author of Perilous Bounty: