Wearing a white tank high inside a foggy greenhouse at his farm in Otofuke on the island of Hokkaido in Japan, Hiroyuki Nakagawa plucks ripened mangoes able to be packed and shipped.
Outside the temperature is a freezing -8C on a transparent December day, however contained in the greenhouse the thermometer clocks in round 36C.
Nakagawa has been rising mangoes within the snowy Tokachi area of Japan’s northernmost island since 2011. He sells them for as a lot as $230 every. He by no means thought an experiment in sustainable farming would sooner or later yield the world’s costliest mangoes.
Nakagawa switched to mango cultivation following years within the oil enterprise, the place surging costs satisfied him of the necessity to look past fossil fuels. Under the steering of one other mango farmer from the southern prefecture of Miyazaki, who claimed it was possible to develop the fruit in winter months, Nakagawa based his farm and established his startup Noraworks Japan. Just a few years later he trademarked his mango model as Hakugin no Taiyo, which interprets to “Sun in the Snow.”
Nakagawa’s secret is utilizing the 2 pure sources his homeland of Hokkaido is legendary for—snow and onsen scorching springs. He shops snow from the winter months and makes use of it in the summertime to chill his greenhouses, tricking the fruits into delaying blooming. Then within the winter he makes use of pure scorching springs to heat the greenhouse and harvest roughly 5,000 mangoes out of season.
The course of permits the mangoes to ripen throughout the cooler months when few bugs are round, which implies no use of pesticides. Hokkaido’s low-humidity local weather additionally reduces the necessity for mold-removing chemical compounds. Plus, harvesting within the winter—when farmers have much less work—permits higher entry to labor at a time when Japan faces a employee scarcity, notably in rural areas.
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