Wasabi from Hong Kong? As Japan’s harvests decline, hi-tech indoor farm tries growing pungent root in city

Hydroponic farm imports wasabi roots for experiments to identify ideal conditions for cultivation

By Oscar Liu
South China Morning Post
Apr, 2023

Gordon Tam Chi-ho places five delicate wasabi roots carefully in pots on a vertical rack in his hi-tech indoor farm at an industrial building in Hong Kong’s Tai Po. He checks the water quality, lighting, temperature and humidity before reminding his workers to take extra care looking after the fragile plants. “They are equivalent to Japan’s national treasure and cannot die,” Tam, in his forties, said. Wasabi is Japanese horseradish, which is grated to a green, pungent paste served with raw fish in sushi, sashimi, soba and rice bowls. With Japan’s wasabi harvest slumping by three-fifths over 15 years to 1,885.5 tonnes in 2021, according to official data, Tam is on a mission to raise commercially viable horseradish in Hong Kong and Japan.

He brought the wasabi roots from Japan, as part of a planned HK$10.1 million (US$1.3 million) deal between his start-up hydroponic company, Farm66, and a Japanese conglomerate. He has designed 44-foot containers equipped with racks and a lighting, irrigation and ventilation system to create an all-weather, controlled environment. Japan asks Hong Kong: weigh data before curbing seafood over nuclear waste plan “Wasabi shortages have worsened in recent years to such an alarming extent that it triggered the Japanese to look for alternatives,” he said. He recalled how two Japanese men turned up at his vertical farm in Tai Po Industrial Estate late last year. “I thought they were here to buy vegetables, but it turned out they were representatives of the Japanese conglomerate looking for help to increase wasabi supplies after getting to know what we do,” he said.

He co-founded Farm66 in 2013, growing lettuce, kale, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers and herbs indoors in customised shipping containers placed on vertical racks, with robotic systems to ensure the plants get the right amount of water, nutrients and light . The Japanese company, based in Wakayama city in the Kansai region, has asked Tam to create 10 customised farming containers at US$130,000 each. It asked not be named yet, as the two sides are finalising their contract. As many as 2,800 wasabi roots can be grown in a single container at the same time, taking nine months to harvest. A prototype of his system would be shipped to Wakayama in July, he said. “The company has tried to do vertical farming in an abandoned school using fluorescent lamps to grow wasabi plants, which is a far less controlled environment.

We offer a system that they can use to control and monitor the habitat via a mobile phone,” Tam said. Hong Kong could get first offshore wind farm in 2027, with power for 120,000 families Kyoko Yamane, an associate professor of applied biological sciences at Gifu University in Honshu, Japan, told the Post that the dwindling wasabi harvest had become more dire every year, and climate change was one of the reasons. It grows naturally in pebbles of clear-running streams in mountain rivers under cool and shady conditions. Yamane said aside from global warming, Japan’s farmers were also ageing, and that was a factor in the declining harvests. “Wasabi is an important economic plant with a unique presence that affects our food procurement, food culture and the environment,” Yamane said.

Hong Kong food lovers are no strangers to Japanese cuisine, or the pairing of wasabi with raw fish. Alvin Lam Chin-cheung, 39, owner of Hirou Tsuki izakaya, a Japanese-style casual establishment serving food and drinks in San Po Kong, said the price of imported wasabi had shot up by a fifth since the middle of last year to HK$130 per root of about 150 grams to 200 grams (7 oz). “One wasabi root can be grated to a paste for 10 servings of a sashimi platter,” he said. If fresh wasabi could be sourced locally, it would cut shipping costs, he said. Towards that end, farmer Tam is conducting tests at his 20,000 sq ft farm to identify the ideal conditions to grow wasabi.

He has found that the leaves grow bigger under white light, whereas the stems grow longer under a combination of red and blue light. “Wasabi is very sensitive to changes in the environment,” he said. He said he expected that the time needed before harvest could be shortened to nine months indoors, compared with 15 to 24 in the traditional way. Kombucha start-up sends a message by only using fruit grown in Hong Kong Dawn Au Ching-tung, an assistant professor in the department of food and health science at the Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong, said farming wasabi through hydroponics could be viable. She thought Tam’s hydroponic cultivation experience could also be used to grow plants for traditional Chinese medicine. “It could speed up the growing process of various rhizomes without worrying if the soil may be contaminated in the natural environment,” she said, referring to underground plant stems.”

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