This morning saw me on a bus heading out from Nagoya to look at agricultural practices in nearby parts of the east coast of Japan close to the city's port district, the place from which a lot of Japanese cars, and especially Toyotas, are sent to the rest of the world. The city of Toyota was en route to our destination. Much of the afternoon revolved around the growing and marketing of chrysanthemums, a favourite flower of the Japanese since the emperor sits on the Chrysanthemum throne.
The following images are just a fraction of what we saw, taking into account growing them and also sorting and packaging the blooms. A local farmer, who spoke no English explained how the blooms were grown in hundreds of local glass-houses each owned by individual small-scale farmers, but processed by the local cooperative they owned.
The first picture shows a crop ready to be harvested 100 days after initial planting out of the seedlings. This schedule means that farmers can generate three crops a year. Today, the temperature inside this glass-house was > 40 C! The stems, with training via a network of strings shown in the third picture, grow tall and straight and their height can be gauged by the height of the people in the second picture. The blooms are picked when the flowers begin to emerge but are not fully out. The uniformity of height of the plants is helped by excellent soil and the feeding of nutrients to the roots via a network of watering pipes not shown here.
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The farmer, who owns the facility we saw, is on the left of this picture. He's helped by family members and four employees, one Japanese and three 'apprentices' from China.
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The blooms are then placed one by one on a conveyor belt by hand as shown here - and we were told that the labourers were Brazilian-Japanese (at least 1/16th Japanese). I seem to recall that the mostly women's husbands worked in the car industry in the district. There were quite a few of these conveyor belts in operation and I'd guess that the cooperative was processing 100,000+ flowers a day. The conveyor belt automatically sorted the blooms according to length, size of flower and other characteristics to form homogeneous bunches.
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Alternatively, the bunches were stored in boxes like those below and ready to go to customers.
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The vertical bunches shown two above were later on placed in large boxes ready for despatch to customers.
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So there you have it - much of the necessary information to set yourselves up in business.
By the way, the return trip to Nagoya was glacially slow as we were caught in heavy rush-hour traffic. Still, the meal 8 of us had tonight in a local Sushi bar was very good. Back to the normal conference activities of delivering papers and chairing sessions tomorrow. And I may be posting to this BLOG this time next year from Bucharest!!
AS
The following images are just a fraction of what we saw, taking into account growing them and also sorting and packaging the blooms. A local farmer, who spoke no English explained how the blooms were grown in hundreds of local glass-houses each owned by individual small-scale farmers, but processed by the local cooperative they owned.
The first picture shows a crop ready to be harvested 100 days after initial planting out of the seedlings. This schedule means that farmers can generate three crops a year. Today, the temperature inside this glass-house was > 40 C! The stems, with training via a network of strings shown in the third picture, grow tall and straight and their height can be gauged by the height of the people in the second picture. The blooms are picked when the flowers begin to emerge but are not fully out. The uniformity of height of the plants is helped by excellent soil and the feeding of nutrients to the roots via a network of watering pipes not shown here.
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The farmer, who owns the facility we saw, is on the left of this picture. He's helped by family members and four employees, one Japanese and three 'apprentices' from China.
.jpg)
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The next picture shows the blooms arriving from the greenhouse in large bundles wrapped in paper.
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The blooms are then placed one by one on a conveyor belt by hand as shown here - and we were told that the labourers were Brazilian-Japanese (at least 1/16th Japanese). I seem to recall that the mostly women's husbands worked in the car industry in the district. There were quite a few of these conveyor belts in operation and I'd guess that the cooperative was processing 100,000+ flowers a day. The conveyor belt automatically sorted the blooms according to length, size of flower and other characteristics to form homogeneous bunches.
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The bunches were stored upright, as shown in this picture, but after the lower stems were wrapped tightly in plastic. All the flowers shown here had been processed today by the time we arrived.
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Alternatively, the bunches were stored in boxes like those below and ready to go to customers.
.jpg)
The vertical bunches shown two above were later on placed in large boxes ready for despatch to customers.
.jpg)
So there you have it - much of the necessary information to set yourselves up in business.
By the way, the return trip to Nagoya was glacially slow as we were caught in heavy rush-hour traffic. Still, the meal 8 of us had tonight in a local Sushi bar was very good. Back to the normal conference activities of delivering papers and chairing sessions tomorrow. And I may be posting to this BLOG this time next year from Bucharest!!
AS
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