Mechanism and Dissemination of High Quality Vegetable Cultivation Technique Using Local Wood Biomass and Filamentous Fungi

Associate Professor Kae Miyazawa is investigating a new farming method called "Radical Carbon Farming”. Miyazawa heads up her own laboratory within the Laboratory of Global Plant Resource Science, The University of Tokyo, Japan. She and her team discovered that some farmers had succeeded in increasing yield and quality by applying wood chips without fertilisers or pesticides and conducted field surveys that revealed that filamentous fungi were dominating, the soil was free of traces of hardpan layers, and vegetables were growing large. This led Miyazawa to attempt to reproduce these outcomes and, over time, began to gain a sense of where to pay attention to grow fungi in the field. To date, the researchers' experiments have demonstrated that the radical carbon farming method softens the hardpan layer and increases the yield of vegetables, along with improvements in vegetable quality. Miyazawa and the team hypothesise that in radical carbon farming, filamentous fungi prevent the excessive release of inorganic nitrogen even in summer, thereby enabling high-quality leafy vegetables to be cultivated. The researchers intend to collaborate with other agricultural researchers, along with fields such as environmental psychology, neuroscience, and economics and, ultimately, usher in a future where human activities such as agriculture enrich rather than damage the global environment.