TOKYO’S investment bankers shortly will be striking their billion-dollar deals above a vegetable farm.

The Otemachi financial district, where office property is among the most expensive in the world, is to host an experimental project aimed at converting former executives to employment in agriculture.

In what used to be the vaults of one of Japan’s biggest banks, a 1,000 sq metre “vegetable factory” will grow rice, tomatoes, strawberries and other produce.

The subterranean farm will use hydroponics — a process by which plants are grown in a solution of nutrients, rather than in soil, under artificial lighting. Because the facility is underground, every aspect of the environment can be controlled, from heat to light to humidity, allowing project managers to tweak the conditions to maximise efficiency.

Although the farm's day-to-day operations will be run by a computer, the project is being used to train Tokyo’s jobless — many of whom lost their jobs during the Japanese banking crisis — in the business of commercial agriculture.

The project is run by the Kanto Employment Creation Organisation (Keco), an association of big Japanese companies, including Sony and Canon. Its aim is to explore ways to channel the skills of thousands of workers made redundant by corporate restructuring into sectors that are suffering from a labour shortage.

The farming industry has suffered particularly from the economic trends of the past 30 years as children born in rural areas increasingly have chosen to move into the big cities when they leave school.

By May, the Otemachi underground farm will reap its first harvest and, if it is a success, Keco will launch similar projects in other cities.

Among Keco’s members is Pasona, a Japanese staffing agency that has made its name by backing schemes that find work for unemployed men in their 40s and 50s, whom corporate Japan generally ignores.

Its recent initiatives have been aimed at putting to work in the agricultural sector the marketing skills of former white-collar workers.

The Government is keen on any venture that pushes the Japanese back towards farming. In so-called special agricultural districts planned by Junichiro Koizumi, the Prime Minister, private companies will be allowed to rent land to enter the farming business.

The Otemachi financial district has been the target recently of a variety of initiatives to bring together the worlds of banking and farming. Village agricultural co-operative societies have been given special rates on commercial property to open sales offices pitching everything from cabbages to seaweed.

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