Technology:
It goes without saying that Japan
has to increase the competitive edge of its agriculture to cope with the agreement
on the picture of the PPT negotiations. Hitachi and the Softbank Group have jointly
announced that they will launch the “e-kakashi (scarecrow or bird scanner),
which is the support system to help farmers confirm crop’s growing environment,
on the 14th of October. Farmers can confirm easily the growing environment of
their crop by installing a device that incorporates a senor in their fields to secure
the quality of their products.
The new service asks farmers to
install a special device with a sensor to measure such data as temperature, amount
of insolation, and soil moisture. Collected data will be transmitted to cloud
automatically and farmers can see them with their smartphones. No initial
setting is required, and what farmers have to do is just switching on the
system. Every farmer can operate this system quite easily. The special device
can run continuously for three years on the condition that it measures the
environment every 10 minutes. Farmers can pick the function to show the optimal
environment depending on such growth stages as seeding and sprouting. The
system is available for 749,600 yen and up excluding tax, and users have to pay
usage charge of 7,980 yen per month. Hitachi builds the device using its internet-of-things
technology.
Yano Research Institute, one of
Japan’s leading research firms, predicts that the Japanese domestic market of smart
agriculture, which is supported by IT technology for better efficiency, will
increase to about 31 billion yen in 2020, five times bigger than in 2013. The JAKurikyo in Miyagi Prefecture is scheduled to introduce the system on trial ahead
of other agricultural cooperatives with the expectation that the system will
help stabilize crop’s quality.
Smartphone to manage rice cropping
Science changes agriculture and fishery
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