Hello everyone! I’m Shohei.
This column is about what I felt and experienced at a plant factory in Japan.
When you’ve been in the field for over 10 years, a lot of things happen. I write freely about what I remember.
Please feel free to read it while thinking, “Wow, that’s how Japanese plant factories work.”
Invasion of swarms of insects and my experience with them entering a plant factory
It was a humid and sweltering day shortly after the end of the rainy season.
That morning, when I went to work as usual, I noticed that the visibility outside the periphery of the plant factory was unusually hazy.
The plant factory I worked at at that time was situated in an environment where a water channel flowed to its side and paddy fields surrounded its periphery. It seemed that something was clearly amiss around that water channel.
After parking my car in the parking lot, I took a good look towards the hazy water channel and saw that a great number of tiny insects were swarming.
They must have hatched all at once in accordance with the season. Nevertheless, their number was extraordinary.
In this book, I explain that “insects that invade from the outside are not a major concern,” but when faced with such a massive swarm of insects, that is another matter.
The especially troublesome thing was that there was an entrance on the factory side facing the water channel, and there was a small gap in the sheet shutter to the entrance.
Normally, a small gap like that would not be a problem, but on that particular day, it was.
I hurriedly entered the factory and went to the entrance, where it was already overrun with insects.
The insects were entering the factory one after another through that gap. Their number was truly astonishing.
I was momentarily taken aback by the sheer number of insects, but I knew I had to do something.
For the time being, I tried placing 粘着シート traps, but they were utterly useless.
In an instant, the sheets were completely covered with insects, and a new swarm of insects marched without hesitation over the insects stuck to them.
I should have probably started by blocking the gap where the insects were invading from, but the gap, while small, covered a large area, so it would have taken time.
There were already a great number of insects that had entered the entrance, so I didn’t have any time to think.
Before I knew it, a great number of insects were clinging to the floor and walls inside the building, and some of them were flying around.
“This is bad…” an intuition told me, so I took a chance and brought out a vacuum cleaner and started sucking them up with brute force.
I kept wielding the vacuum cleaner to try to stop the insects from entering one after another. I was desperate to prevent any of them from reaching the cultivation area at all costs.
The battle subsided somewhat by afternoon.
As the insects outside all suddenly died, there was no more trouble
This column was published in a collection of know-how to improve on-site skills.
This column is included in the Plant Factory Know-How Collection below.
This know-how collection is packed with useful tips to help you increase profitability, regardless of the specifications or equipment on-site.
This is a must-read for those operating plant factories or indoor farms. Implement the know-how to increase profitability.
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