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Microsoft, Fujitsu team in Internet of Lettuce effort

Pair plan salad days for leafy vegetable growers

A nearly two-year-old Fujitsu project to apply sensors and cloud computing to growing low-potassium vegetables has attracted the attention of Microsoft.

The two companies have used what's probably the least-leafy venue imaginable, Hannover Messe, to announce a tie-up in which Windows 8.1 Pro running on Fujitsu devices, Fujitsu's Cloud A5 for Microsoft Azure, and Fujitsu's IoT/machine-to-machine platform.

The agreement, announced here, gives an Azure tinge to a project in Aizu-Wakamatsu in Japan, under which Fujitsu has been working on growing low-potassium vegetables suitable for dialysis patients and those with chronic kidney disease.

The 2013 Japanese project applied sensors and computing to closely monitor the chemical composition of the liquid fertilisers used in growing lettuce, which had a production target of 3,500 heads of lettuce a day.

The facility operated in clean room space formerly used for chip design, and Fujitsu now wants to apply more cloud, IoT and M2M to the lettuce production.

Fujitsu's Eco-Management Dashboard will sit above input data collected by Microsoft Azure for analysis, to “manage product quality, process efficiency and equipment performance”.

The Akisai chip fab was decommissioned for silicon work in the company's 2010 in a reorganisation. ®

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