DAVE: Optimizing Wasabi Agriculture Through Automation and Successive Approximation

Abstract

Wasabi agriculture continues to predominantly rely on traditional practices. There currently exists an abundance of botanical literature surrounding the optimization of the wasabi growth environment to increase crop quality, however this research is detached and independent. Considering the recent rise to prominence of cyber-agriculture technology, its use in further optimizing the wasabi growth environment should be considered. By designing and constructing two wasabi-oriented food computer prototype iterations, uniting and synchronizing the results of existing wasabi optimization research, and growing Wasabia japonica plants inside these food computers, it was found that despite the widely reported difficulty of traditional wasabi farming, the crop is a strong contender for novel cyber-agriculture: the plant tissues showed a 69.3% increase in flavour compound (allyl isothiocyanate) concentration overall. The plants also exhibited a 74.7% decrease in overall plant mass, pointing to a well-documented phenomenon dubbed the “dilution effect” present in intensive agriculture. Overall, given future design improvements and more extensive data collection, there exists the possibility to revolutionize wasabi agriculture by engineering cyber-agriculture solutions tailored to wasabi growth.