High-tech Strawberry Farming: Hiroki Iwasa / President & CEO, GRA

Welcome to Direct Talk. This month on NHK WORLD, we put the spotlight on the Tohoku Region, in the northeast of Japan's main island. Our guest today is Hiroki Iwasa, President and CEO of GRA, an agriculture products company. Iwasa is a native of Miyagi Prefecture, which was hit especially hard by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. His company has been applying tech solutions to grow a certain kind of fruit... strawberries. Its premium strawberries are vivid red and perfectly cone-shaped, and sell in Japan for about 9 US dollars each. We asked Iwasa how he aims to revitalize the region using strawberries.

GRA stands for "General Reconstruction Association." As a company, we're committed to the recovery effort.

Starting up a business means creating jobs, and making the regional economy stronger. Our aim is to demonstrate that firsthand.

Here is a box of Iwasa's strawberries. The concept: edible jewels. Only the best-tasting, most perfectly-shaped fruits of the harvest are individually wrapped and packaged.

Only one in 100 strawberries that are particularly well-shaped and flavorful fall into what we call "platinum-class." We sell them in Japan for about 1,000 yen each. They're perfectly cone-shaped. No bumps. They're bright red, meaning maximum ripeness. And they taste incredible. They have three big characteristics: high sugar content, pleasant tartness, and an intense aroma.

We take the ones that are at maximum ripeness, very delicate - and package them. They're unlike any strawberry you've ever had before. People are stunned.

How are Iwasa's precious strawberries grown? This is his farm in the town of Yamamoto in Miyagi Prefecture.

About 120 tons of strawberries are grown annually in these nine greenhouses. They're equipped with high-tech solutions. A monitoring system that uses sensors to measure factors like temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels. The greenhouses are monitored 24/7 from a control room, all to ensure that the environment is perfect for cultivating strawberries.

The ideal CO2 level is about 400 parts per million. With the greenhouses, if the level dropped below 400 parts per million, if it's warm inside, the system automatically opens the windows and lets in air from outside. If it's cold inside, it keeps the windows closed and pumps CO2 into the greenhouse for the plants.

Opening and closing windows, up until now, people had to do that themselves. But if someone couldn't be there for some reason, it didn't matter if it was too warm or too cold for the strawberries, the windows would stay as they were.

But by putting all that in the hands of the computer and the sensors, you can always keep an ideal environment for the strawberries. That's the advantage of using tech.

High-end strawberries cultivated with the help of high-tech equipment. Iwasa got the idea from his university days.

Back in 2002, when he was a student at a university in Tokyo, he created a system development startup. He was well-versed in the latest tech trends.

I've loved computers since I was a kid. I was obsessed. I started getting into programming in elementary school. The main thing my startup made was, for example, software for real estate developers to enter their clients' info and manage their data. We made software tailored to each of their needs.

Also, we developed network infrastructure for large buildings. We looked at data flow requirements and designed systems to meet their network infrastructure needs.

This was back in the 2000s, when IT was suddenly coming into every aspect of our society. There was lots of demand, and it was a great time to launch a startup.

But then, something happened that would change the course of Iwasa's life. March 11th, 2011. The Tohoku region was hit hard by the Great East Japan Earthquake. Iwasa's hometown of Yamamoto was devastated by a tsunami.

That day I was at my home in Tokyo. There was a really intense shaking, and I switched on the TV and was staring absent-mindedly when I saw my hometown being swallowed by a tsunami. I couldn't believe it.

It was really difficult to watch. It felt like it was me being devastated, being destroyed. It made me realize how deeply connected my body is to where I was born and raised - the land, the air, the water. It's all part of me.

I wanted to help. I collected information about where people were evacuating to, what kind of supplies they needed, things like that. And I spread the word on the internet. That's what I was doing at first.

Iwasa and his friends soon began volunteering on the ground. While they were shoveling mud out of houses in the affected area, a townsperson came up to him and had something to say.

They said to me, "You guys are businesspeople. We're grateful you're out here shoveling mud. But our children would be really grateful if you could create places for them to work." A lot of people said that to me.

The town's industries had been pretty much destroyed, meaning practically no places for young people to work. They would have no choice but to move elsewhere.

We came to the conclusion that the most important thing was to create an environment within the town of Yamamoto where people could work and live at least somewhat comfortably. So what could we do?

Iwasa looked to what his hometown did best. Strawberry farming, which had a long history in the town. Before the earthquake, the region was home to over 120 strawberry farmers. Only a few remained after the tsunami.

I did a survey of the townspeople. I gathered about 200 of them, and asked, what do you think is the pride of Yamamoto? 70 percent of them answered "strawberries." And I realized that had value in terms of business, but also in terms of symbolic significance. That's not easy to find. So we decided to go with strawberries.

One year on from the earthquake, Iwasa founded GRA in the hopes of revitalizing his hometown. He initially turned to a veteran farmer for advice about growing strawberries. Following their first harvest, however, he found himself unsure about the company's future.

The first harvest was great. It all came down to the experienced farmer's instinct and experience. We just went along with it, and ended up with these amazing strawberries.

But it hit me that the farmer could make the strawberries, but no one else could. So our operation was limited to how much oversight he could provide. We couldn't scale up, we couldn't create more jobs. I assumed there was no way we could really teach new people how to farm. I thought we were in trouble.

Iwasa turned to what he knew best... a high-tech solution. He decided to use tech to recreate the oversight and expertise of the veteran farmer.

The first step was to set up a series of sensors that would monitor the strawberry growing environment. Next, we use the data we collect to climate-control the environment. That's the process.

Up until now, the farmer would say something like "The strawberries aren't looking so good." "Why?" I'd ask. "Well, they're just not doing so well right now."

But if they're not doing so well, there's always a reason behind it. They're not getting nutrients, or the roots are not absorbing water, and maybe we need to be adjusting how much water we give them. We wanted to quantify all the reasons why this could be happening.

Iwasa's high-tech system has yielded high-quality harvests. He has also focused his efforts on establishing a strawberry brand. Harvested strawberries are categorized according to appearance and taste. Iwasa took the top-class strawberries to department stores in Tokyo.

From around the second year, we were producing great strawberries. But the value would go down if we just sold them everywhere. I wanted to build a brand. So we started selling at high-end department stores, where they only sell the cream of the crop. We emphasized choosing the right sales channels.

The branding strategy worked. "Made in Yamamoto" became synonymous with quality. That, in turn, got people interested in the region. It's contributed to the regional economy as a whole.

Nine years on from the earthquake, Iwasa now also sells his strawberries overseas. And now he's focused on training a new generation of strawberry farmers. He's set up a strawberry farming school on the company's grounds, where he teaches his high-tech cultivation methods.

It took an extraordinary amount of work to start farming. No one taught me how. I had to do it myself. And I started thinking that there's probably no one out there anymore who wants to farm so badly that they would go through all that. But it was still my vision that strawberry farmers would gather here in Yamamoto, and that it would be the central industry of the town. I decided to pass on the know-how we'd accumulated.

We teach the theoretical stuff in the classroom. We also have a training greenhouse, where trainees learn to grow their own strawberries. We also do IT training. The trainees go through all of that.

We already have nine graduates who have started their own farms. It's gotten to the point where the scale of the industry is bigger than just GRA. And it's only getting bigger.

This is a greenhouse belonging to a recent graduate. Although he had no previous farming experience, he's already producing high-quality strawberries which are all bought by Iwasa's company. They're sold around Japan and overseas as Yamamoto-grown strawberries, boosting the local economy in the process.

The goal isn't to make my company bigger. There's not much point to that. What's important for the region is to create lots of business owners. Each operator has autonomy, and they engage in business, in our case, strawberry farming. That creates jobs and revitalizes the town.

If my company was the only one growing, that's only one managing body, only one president - me. From a mid-to-long term perspective, what's best is to have various independent business owners who debate and discuss as they grow.

Agriculture, more than anything else, should be about collective growth and development. Having many associates means everyone can grow more rapidly than they would have alone. It contributes to the community, creating positive momentum.

Do you have any words to live by?

"Action creates value." If you have a strong idea, strong intention, take action and make something.

If you have a thought or guiding principle or the will, the next step is to give it a go, immediately. When you do that, you find that all these different people take interest, start supporting you. And doing something means you will also experience failure, which teaches you so much. So you have to take action. For me, that's been everything I've been doing with GRA, since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.