In Japan, Idled Electronics Factories Find New Life in Farming | Hacker News Reader

In Japan, Idled Electronics Factories Find New Life in Farming

online.wsj.com

99 pointsT-A31 comments

He also wants to restructure Japanese agriculture, which is dominated by aging family farmers working tiny plots of land, a system that results in high food costs. If big companies move into farming, Mr. Abe reckons, prices will fall.

What is the plan to deal with the obvious consequence of removing this built-in subsidy on a huge number of people who have no other skill than farming? It would need to be replaced with something explicit.

I don't argue against technological progress simply because it would make old jobs obsolete. But in this situation the consequences are fairly predictable, so why not make a plan for it instead of throwing the elderly family farmers of Japan to the wolves of the free market?

The high food costs are because Japan imports most of its food. I don't think these indoor farms are meant to compete with the existing farms (which mostly grow rice, one of few agricultural products which Japan is a net exporter of), but rather with imports.

>The high food costs are because Japan imports most of its food.

You'll find that the highest priced versions of a food are those produced domestically, beef being a prime example.

As someone who pays the weekly food bill, I think that is simply not true (about the costs).

A great deal of the vegetables are also grown on small farms here. I think the quality and taste are much better for it, but prices are very high for even simple things.

When I moved from rural Gunma to Tokyo, I was surprised at how much the vegetable prices went up and the quality went down. I suppose that's why.

The price is so high, because they don't import enough food. They have ridiculous tariffs.

Seems like Japan would be a prime candidate for universal basic income. Above average unemployment + high social welfare + high productivity/automation.

I certainly would vote for politicians that would support universal basic income in Japan. A calculation done in the past few years found that ¥50,000 a month (about $500 US) could be paid out to each citizen without raising any extra revenue. Something closer to ¥170,000 a month would probably be more reasonable, if we could figure it out.

Who did the calculation? I'd be keen to see the breakdown.

My rough estimates put the cost of JPY50k/month to the adult population at somewhere around USD 700 billion/year and JPY170k/month at USD2,400 billion, or around 47% of Japan's GDP. Total social security spending is currently in the order of USD300 billion.

Given that the Japan Government currently spends (excluding interest costs) around USD230 billion more than it earns in revenue each year, such a proposal would be extremely difficult to implement.

For reference, in 2014 the Japan Government has:

- Outstanding debt of ~USD12,100 billion

- Annual revenue of ~USD691 billion

- Annual spending of ~USD921 billion.

The 50k JPY figure comes from the budget for social welfare in Japan. Here is an article where it is broken down for 2009: http://diamond.jp/articles/-/16672

But, let me try it with figures from 2011.[1]

107,495 billion JPY for total social welfare 32,463 billion JPY for national health insurance

The author deducted the amount spent for national health insurance from total social welfare.

That leaves: 75, 032 billion JPY

It should only be for the adult population, but I can't find numbers for just adults, so I divided by 120million.

625,266 JPY annually or 52105.5 JPY a month.

IIRC social insurance is not included in the general budget.

As far as the 170k JPY calculation, that was just my imagining what would be a reasonable basic income. I have never crunched the numbers on it.

But, it comes out to 2.04 million yen a year. Since the GDP per capita in Japan is 3.76 million JPY, this would be quite the redistribution of wealth.

[1] http://www.ipss.go.jp/ss-cost/j/fsss-h23/h23.pdf

Thanks for the link, it's an interesting report.

Indeed, the social insurance premiums/expenditures are not included in govt. revenue/expenditure figures, thus the disconnect.

It's worth noting that ~25% (JPY29,040 billion - JPY20k per month per capita) of the funding for those programs comes from employer contributions for their employees.

???

Japan's unemployment rate is only 3.9%. EU's rate is 10.9% and US' is 6.1%.

And Japan's social welfare means mostly pension and national health insurance. There's unemployment insurance, but you have to pay into it. Very few working-age, able-bodied people receive "free" welfare benefits.

you have to be very careful comparing rates of unemployment, if not most statistics, of different countries as each has its own determination of what is and what isn't. Even in the US we have numerous measures of unemployment, the most common is the number of people actively seeking who do not have a job.

Why not look at the population as a whole, determine the number of people 18-65 (or whatever retirement age is) who are working versus those not working. You can knock out percentages based on students, severely disabled, and such.

Japan has a rapidly shrinking population, its farmers are overwhelmingly elderly and dying off. A fair amount of automation is needed simply to maintain current production levels, which are already insufficient to cover local consumption, so Japan imports a lot of food from China.

Also, Japanese food prices are kept artifically high by a cozy subsidy racket run by semi-governmental coop union JA ($5 for a kilo of rice, anyone?) but that's another story.

I found this a bit amusing because I do not recall ever eating food made using lettuce while in Japan, except for maybe a single salad. It's simply not a large staple crop there. That is probably why Fujitsu chose it, as opposed to a crop like rice or a type of bean. It will be interesting to see if this type of production picks up, although I do not see why it would.

Lettuce is not exactly a staple in Japan, but it's common enough that you'd have to go out of your way to avoid it. It's in sandwiches like you'd expect, it's in garnish, it's in salad (though the Japanese seem to prefer cabbage-based salad), and you can buy it at any supermarket.

Semiconductor manufacturing involves the use of highly toxic chemicals, both in the manufacturing process itself and in ancillary uses, such as agents that help keep the clean rooms clean.

I'm sure these converted clean rooms are excellent at negating microbial and particulate contamination, though I have to wonder how much concern has been given to negating chemical contamination, given the purpose these facilities previously served.

Interesting the WSJ article doesn't mention the low potassium which was the focus of the previous press release (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7803855) There are some pretty awesome automated farming things going on[1] which are going to be more impactful than this I suspect seems like not all hydroponics in California are about pot grow systems :-)

[1] http://www.viridisaquaponics.com/#about

Edit: I take it back, the WSJ does mention the Low-K angle, I just missed it on my first reading.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7803855

Some additional considerations here: (1) climate change is probably not going to be good for the global agriculture market and (2) the nearest country with lots of farmable land is China, a country Japan has not historically gotten along with.

China and Japan actually only hated each other in the last 100 years (maybe 50). If you look at the period of time of last 2000 years China and Japan were on much more reasonable terms.

Zhou Enlai said,“two thousand years of friendship and five decades of misfortune,” about the relationship between China and Japan.

Patent abstract for the method used: http://www19.ipdl.inpit.go.jp/PA1/cgi-bin/PA1DETAIL

This only makes sense because it is a speciality gourmet product.

It has little to do with food security.

Should this article make a bigger deal about the fact that they are growing food in clean rooms 60 miles from the world's worst nuclear disaster, whose cleanup is still ongoing?

That seemed odd to me until I compared it with the passage before it; that Fukushima grows much of the agriculture in Japan seems startling enough, but then I don't claim to know much about radioactive fallout and growing crops within x, y, z miles. I probably wouldn't eat Chernobyl beets.

Apparently background radiation in Chernybyl is half what it is in Denver.

https://sites.google.com/site/radioactivityinbasel/radioacti...

The geology building at Colorado School of Mines (a few miles west of Denver) used to have a display case in the main hallway with a Geiger counter running 24/7, and posters explaining what different spikes meant (ie, uranium decay made the needle move to such-and-such number). Sometimes I'd stand in the hallway between classes and watch. It was never more than about 15 seconds between decay events.

I don't think so. The current cleanup at Fukushima relates mostly to the flow of contaminated ground water directly in the vicinity of the plant, as well as the problem of finding out where to send waste currently stored on site. Airborne radiation is currently not so much of a problem. Even when airborne radiation was a problem, wind patterns tend to carry the contaminated air east, across the Pacific, rather than inland.

So ongoing radiation would not be expected to cause major concerns with Fujitsu's relatively removed work. Residual radiation and contamination of the soil used could pose problems, but I do not think they will. Given how low they have gotten the potassium levels, I expect that control over the growing environment and soil will is quite high.

> Should this article make a bigger deal...

Probably no. 60 miles is about 100km. The radius of the evacuation area is 30km.

Probably not - because these are grown in "in a sterile, dust-free clean room that once built the brains of high-tech gadgets"

Probably cleaner than "normal" produce, with all the pollution it deals with.

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