Capital and business alliance on NEWGREEN's low environmental impact rice ~Demonstration started for no-water rice cultivation~

Chubu Electric Power and NEWGREEN Inc. (President and CEO: Daisuke Yamanaka; Location: Koganei, Tokyo; hereinafter "NEWGREEN") have agreed to a business alliance to commercialize rice production through direct seeding and water-saving cultivation of paddy rice (hereinafter "the cultivation method"). Today, Chubu Electric Power announced that it has invested approximately 100 million yen in a third-party allotment of new shares conducted by NEWGREEN.

NEWGREEN is a group company of SHONAI Inc. (President: Daisuke Yamanaka, Location: Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture). With the mission of "connecting Japanese agriculture with the global green market," NEWGREEN is an agricultural venture that develops and manufactures automatic weed control robots for paddy fields, supports production and distribution of organic rice and low environmental impact rice, as well as develops and sells agricultural materials using unutilized resources.

Domestic agriculture, most notably rice cultivation, is now facing a number of social issues, such as the aging and decline of farmers, the occurrence of degraded farmland, and the need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, such as methane.

NEWGREEN promotes a cultivation method in which seed rice is sown directly and cultivated without water basically until harvest, taking in water and nutrients from rainwater and groundwater through a medium such as mycorrhizal fungi to grow the rice.
The cultivation method saves labor for seedling cultivation, rice planting, and water management, which account for approximately 60% of the labor required in conventional cultivation, and significantly improves productivity, leading to the elimination of degraded farmland through farmland accumulation and intensification as well as the reduction of methane emissions close to zero by not applying water.

Based on this agreement, Chubu Electric Power, in cooperation with NEWGREEN, will begin a demonstration of the cultivation method in the Chubu area this fiscal year. After establishing a cultivation system over a large area through the demonstration, the company will promote full-scale cultivation from the next fiscal year onward, and expand the production bases through collaboration with producers while aiming to establish supply chains in Japan and overseas. In addition, the two companies will study the creation of new business models that combine the resources and services of each company.

Through the production of rice using this highly productive and decarbonizing cultivation method, Chubu Electric Power will build a food infrastructure to solve social issues in the agricultural sector thus contributing to the realization of a sustainable and livable society and the achievement of the SDGs.

<Reference> Overview of NEWGREEN