A Kyoto startup has developed a soil additive that it says can revive farmland devastated by salty tsunami water in about four weeks.
A Kyoto startup has developed a soil additive that it says can revive farmland devastated by salty tsunami water in about four weeks.
My Farm has received grants from cellphone carrier NTT DoCoMo Inc. and electronics giant NEC Corp. to develop the soil additive for mass production.
The agriculture ministry said about 24,000 hectares of farmland in the six prefectures of Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima, Ibaraki and Chiba suffered damage from the tsunami generated by the Great East Japan Earthquake. The government plans to restore the damaged farms in about three years by using large amounts of fresh water to desalinate the soil.
My Farm's soil additive is a mixture of several micro-organism species and organic compost. The micro-organisms decompose residual salinity in soil.
The company says the soil becomes usable for planting in about a month and returns nearly to its original state in about three months.
When the agent was first used in June on a damaged farm in Iwanuma, Miyagi Prefecture, the salinity dropped from 2.9 percent to 0.8 percent in two months, and the soil produced tomato harvests in late August.
When Kazuma Nishitsuji, My Farm's 29-year-old president, was a student at Kyoto University, he studied traditional soil amendment methods from different areas of Japan.
After the March 11 disaster, a traditional desalination method from his native Fukui Prefecture, which relies on seaborne micro-organisms, gave him the inspiration for developing the new product.
My Farm's soil additive caught the attention of NTT DoCoMo and NEC. As part of measures to assist in postquake rebuilding, both companies provided grants to cover the purchase of mass production equipment and other costs.
They also decided to install on farms treated with the additive sensors that continuously measure the salinity, precipitation and other quantities that affect the soil. The data are retrieved via the Internet and analyzed for feedback to workers at the farms.