Can’t Beat Them? Grow Lettuce: In Japan, Idled Electronics Factories Find New Life in Farming
July 7th, 2014Via: Wall Street Journal:
Haruyasu Miyabe used to oversee a computer-chip production line at a Fujitsu Ltd. plant here. One day last year, the plant manager told Mr. Miyabe to prepare for a career change.
“Starting tomorrow, you are going to make lettuce,” he recalls being told.
Amid troubled times in the Japanese electronics industry, Fujitsu shut one of the three chip-making lines at the plant in 2009. Now, in a sterile, dust-free clean room that once built the brains of high-tech gadgets, Mr. Miyabe and a staff of about 30 tend heads of lettuce.
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Mr. Miyabe and Fujitsu aren’t alone in this circuit-boards-to-plowshares transition. Struggling to compete with rivals in South Korea or China in businesses like televisions and smartphones, a range of Japanese electronics giants are converting idled factories to agriculture.
Last month, as Fujitsu began selling lettuce from the Aizu-Wakamatsu plant, Toshiba Corp. said it would begin growing vegetables inside a floppy disk factory near Tokyo that hasn’t been used for two decades. Later this year, Panasonic Corp. will start selling computer-program controlled greenhouses to grow spinach and other vegetables. And Sharp Corp. last year began laboratory tests to grow strawberries at an indoor site in Dubai using its lighting and air-purifying technologies.
