Japan’s National Agricultural Research Organization NARO and WUR want to collaborate. That is what has brought Kazuhisa Goto to the Wageningen campus.
NARO has a lot in common with Wageningen Research. Where WUR developed the Elstar apple, NARO created the juicy Fuji apple. NARO employs 3300 people at six research stations around Japan, says Goto, a marketing researcher at NARO. He has been on the WUR campus since 2017, working to set up joint research projects. NARO wants to tackle specific issues with WUR, such as ageing and the labour shortage in Japanese agriculture, and climate change.
NARO wants to tackle specific issues with WUR, such as ageing and the labour shortage in Japanese agriculture
The first joint project is already up and running: a ‘data-driven agriculture’ robotics project for potato farming. But there are other smaller projects too, sparked off by the joint conference in 2020 that was attended by 440 researchers from the business world, NARO and WUR. More than 10 NARO researchers have already been stationed at several research groups in Wageningen, including Food and Biobased Research, Plant Breeding and Economic Research. The Japanese researchers will stay here for one or two years. New projects are also in the making, such as a project with the Animal Sciences Group on greenhouse gases and manure management, and the development of 3D food printing systems.