The Tobushima Citrus Club grows an average of about 200 tonnes of lemons per year, but this is expected to jump to 260 tonnes within the next five years, and to 400 tonnes over the next ten years, thanks to the implementation of these new technological initiatives.
Travel west off the coast of Hiroshima City to the island
of Etajima and you will find another project making use of IoT technology, iOstrea, which aims to digitise oyster farming through the use of sensory data. “Etajima has been in trouble since about 1990. The
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process for farming baby oysters became very unstable after this point due to the eff ects of climate change,” says Professor Akihiro Nakao, a Hiroshima native and chairperson of the department of applied computer science at the University of Tokyo, a member of the consortium behind the iOstrea project and another Sandbox grant recipient. The consortium placed solar-powered sensors, which
track data like location and water temperature, onto rafts. This data-gathering process is cheap – an important criterion in order to make it feasible for farmers to adopt in future. Along with the University of Tokyo, the iOstrea
consortium includes electronics manufacturer Sharp – which provides the smartphones used as part of the data-collection process – as well as Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) that is responsible for transmitting the data. Thirty-one groups of fishermen are also participating in the project. As with the Tobishima Citrus Club, iOstrea also plans
to use aerial drones to scour the water for baby oysters, which grow in clusters visible from the air. Real-time GPS tracking is also being used to record the movements of fishing boats to improve eff iciency. “The number of fishermen is decreasing, and they are
also getting older,” says Nakao. “We want to make the process [of oyster farming] very eff icient through the use of information communications technology and artificial intelligence.”
NATURAL DISASTERS Last July saw some of western Japan’s worst rainfall in decades. Floods and landslides resulted in more than 200 deaths, according to Japan’s National Police Agency, with many more injured. The scars on the landscape are still visible in Hiroshima: large sheets of blue tarpaulin covering streaks of upturned earth are a common sight across the prefecture’s hilly terrain.
AP RIL 20 19
FROM LEFT PAGE: Luce Search drone; BeRise virtual reality safety exercise; TeamLab's 'Digitised Hiroshima Castle' installation
“It rained for four straight days,” says Shusaku Akioka,
the mayor of Etajima City where iOstrea is conducting its IoT oyster farming trials. “On two of the days, we had really heavy rain – 500 millimetres, about 40 per cent of the annual average rainfall. We shut down some roads, the river was overflowing, and there were landslides. More than 1,000 places on the island were damaged and more than 40 people were injured.” For lemon farmer Sueoka, landslides resulting from the
heavy rain saw him lose between 10 and 20 per cent of his lemon trees. Many of these were mature trees on the cusp of harvesting, and his only available recourse has been to replant young trees, but these won’t provide produce for another five years. Other farms were affected even more seriously than his. In the aftermath of last year’s heavy rains, another
Hiroshima-based technology firm, drone manufacturer and survey company Luce Search, was instrumental in assessing the damage done by the extreme weather. Founded in 2011, the company specialises in building large drones that can carrying heavy survey equipment, such as
bus ine s s tr a v el ler .c om
CREDIT @2019 BERISE; TEAMLAB
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