Hydroponics sprout hope for Fukushima farmers
Kawauchi, a farming village located 30 kilometres from the site of one of the world’s worst atomic disasters, feared for its future as radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant soaked into the soil.
Then Takeo Endo suggested farming without soil.
Endo is leading a local government team pioneering a project to grow food in a sealedoff hydroponics factory. An aluminum-clad, single-storey building the size of a soccer field will produce 8,000 heads of lettuce a day starting next month. More factories may be built for tomatoes, strawberries and other fruit.
“I was concerned Kawauchi farmers wouldn’t be able to grow rice and vegetables for as long as 10 years,” Endo, 36, said from Kawauchi, 245 kilometres north of Tokyo. “So I thought, ‘What if we grow them in a building, shutting out radiation completely?’ ”
Endo’s lettuce plant, which will use filtered groundwater that tests show is free of contaminants, will start with about 25 employees. The produce will be sold in Fukushima supermarkets and labelled Kawauchi, he said.
Of the village’s 2,835 citizens before the quake, 400 have returned full-time, he said.
Hydroponics work best for vegetables like lettuce, which can take as few as 10 days to grow, but are inefficient for grains like rice that take months.
“This new type of farming will help some of us move on,” said Yoshitaka Akimoto as he looked out across the village, where one-tonne blue plastic bags stuffed with contaminated soil sit in front of neighbouring farmhouses. “But I’ve never once thought of quitting.”
Advances in centuries-old technology that now makes use of LED lights and a water solution infused with fertilizer may restore jobs and revive the area worst hit by the record magnitude-9 earthquake that struck on March 11, 2011. Cooperation between researchers, government and industry to help Fukushima rebuild offers farmers who lost homes and livelihoods the chance to compete with imports and show Japanese consumers their food is safe.
Agricultural shipments to Japan jumped 16 per cent to 5.58 trillion yen ($59 billion) in 2011 in the wake of the disaster, caused when the quake unleashed a 15-metre tsunami that claimed more than 18,000 lives and sparked equipment failures at the Tokyo Electric Power nuclear plant.
Almost half a million people were evacuated from the region. Two years on, a meandering arc stretching 20 kilometres from the plant defines a no-go zone after reactor meltdowns spewed cesium and other radioactive particles into the air, soil and sea. Japan banned farming around the reactors, ordered the slaughter of more than 5,000 livestock and started regular testing nationwide for radiation.
The prefecture was the nation’s fourth-largest rice producer before the accident. It has slipped to seventh place with 2012 output dropping 17 per cent from 2010 to 368,700 metric tonnes, according to the agriculture ministry.
Hydroponics was first tried in Japan by U.S. occupation forces after 1945 because some farmers were using human excrement as fertilizer on their fields, said Tamotsu Ito, a researcher at the Mitsubishi Research Institute in Tokyo. But factory farming didn’t gain traction due to high costs, said Toru Maruo, an associate professor of horticulture at Chiba University. That’s changing, with a facility run by Maruo’s university drawing on assistance from companies, including Maruben and Panasonic, to cut production costs for one head of lettuce to 60 yen, from 300 yen 10 years ago.
Lettuce can be grown hydro-ponically with one per cent of the water and 25 per cent of the fertilizer required in a field, Maruo said. Yields for tomatoes at the university project are the best in Asia, he said.
There were about 100 fruit and vegetable factory farms in Japan at the end of last year, up from 34 in 2009, Mitsubishi’s Ito said.
Almost 100,000 farmers in Fukushima have lost billions since March 2011 and many cannot restart cultivation, said Hideki Sasaki, an official at the local prefectural office of JA Group, Japan’s largest farmers’ co-operative. Kawauchi rice farmers Yoshitaka and Sonoko Akimoto, who supplied the imperial family in 2007, are among them.
“We worked so hard to get certificates showing that our produce was organic,” said Sonoko, 68. “Nuclear blasts destroyed it all.”