Plant Factory

The Plant factory is a facility that provides a steady creation of high-quality vegetables all-year round by artificially controlling the growth environment (e.g., light, temperature, humidity and culture answer), thus allowing farmers to plan production.

Rewards

(1) Capable of secure year-round production

(2) Could be installed onto non-farmland places

(e.g. Business parks and empty stores in searching districts)

(3)Numerous cultivation shelves (top to bottom farming) enables the actual mass production of veggies in small spaces.

(4)No or perhaps minimal pesticide is used.

Vertical-farming

Challenges

Despite the benefits, the Plant factory confronts the common challenges regarding

(1)    High energy as well as facility installation fees

(2)    A limited number of crops available for creation

(3)    Un-established sales vacation spot channel

(Reference)http://www.meti.go.jp/english/policy/sme_chiiki/plantfactory/about.html

Trend

The Plant factory (hydroponics systems) has become much talked about for the last few years in Japan, specifically after the nuclear Plant crash in Fukushima in March of 2011.

Increasing numbers of people are now demanding to consume safe and clean vegetables expanded in Plant factories. As an element of many efforts intended for revitalizing the overall economy and providing a safe food supply in the quake & nuclear-accident-affected areas, the Plant factory is expected to become probably the most promising new sector.

Also a growing amount of restaurants and restaurants in Japan have become serving their food with fresh vegetables expanded on-site. In Tokyo, Train Japan, Inc. opened up a new sandwich cafe equipped with a Plant manufacturing facility. It seems that they are acquiring favorable reviews.

Checking up on the current trend, your Plant factory eventually takes the construction industry by simply storm. It was declared that Marubeni Corp. will launch condominium buildings furnished with Plant factory.

Meet the concern

An interesting article appearing in the Nikkei online presented on one of the issues of the Plant factory; (1) High energy fees and facility installation costs.

"Low-Cost Plant factory benefiting from aluminum processing technology - Plant Factory as the New industry”

An aluminum related products distributor/manufacturer company (Alumis co., ltd., Japan) created a Plant factory with a variety of ideas to hold down the initial price. Taking advantage of their core business of light weight aluminum processing technology, they achieved significant cost benefits on the main part of the unit system generation.

Holding down initial investment cost is the key to boost profitability of the Plant manufacturer.

The article states that their process enables vegetables to grow with much less running costs inspite of the costs of initial phase investment.

According to his or her facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/alumis.jp/), their Plant factory has not only been efficiently implemented by their customers throughout Japan nevertheless by clients in america, China, and South korea as well.

Future

It was announced that the height and width of the Japanese Plant factory industry will be 1.6 billion JPY in 2010 and can even reach to 1.8 billion JPY inside 2015. (1.3 billion JPY in 2009). (Research simply by Fuji Keizai Co Ltd, article research: Nikkei TechOn). It is no doubt which Japan is the obvious leader in the Plant factory business field in the world.

Plant-factory