Old factories becoming high-tech greenhouses

From the Wall Street Journal:

Amid troubled times in the Japanese electronics industry, Fujitsu Ltd. shut one of the three chip-making lines at a plant in 2009. Now, in a sterile, dust-free clean room that once built the brains of high-tech gadgets, a staff of about 30 tend heads of lettuce.

Fujitsu aren't alone in this circuit-boards-to-plowshares transition. Struggling to compete with rivals in South Korea or China in businesses like televisions and smartphones, a range of Japanese electronics giants are converting idled factories to agriculture.

Last month, as Fujitsu began selling lettuce from the Aizu-Wakamatsu plant, Toshiba Corp. said it would begin growing vegetables inside a floppy disk factory near Tokyo that hasn't been used for two decades. Later this year, Panasonic Corp. will start selling computer-program controlled greenhouses to grow spinach and other vegetables. And Sharp Corp. last year began laboratory tests to grow strawberries at an indoor site in Dubai using its lighting and air-purifying technologies.

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