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Tech-savvy farmers a new hope for Japan's shrinking agriculture sector

9 Comments
By Kaori Kaneko

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Average farm size is 7.5 acre that means each farmer gets 7,875,000yen a year in government hand outs before even getting paid for the rice! WTF!

5 ( +5 / -0 )

Average farm size is 7.5 acre that means each farmer gets 7,875,000yen a year in government hand outs before even getting paid for the rice! WTF!

And still, the consumer pays a high price.

Last year there was ridicule in Hong Kong when a high end supermarket was selling one single Japanese strawberry wrapped in styrofoam mesh and then placed in another plastic container. The price? What do you think?

4 ( +4 / -0 )

And still, the consumer pays a high price.

Pukey2, of course the price is higher to the consumer. That's exactly the way the Japanese quota / subsidy system is designed to work.

Rice on the world market is pennies on the dollar compared to Japanese rice.

The business model up until now is: "Elect politicians that support and protect the rice subsidy". We need more people like Yokota-san to get out there and challenge the status quo. Farmers should earn profits on efficiency, not off the taxpayers!!

4 ( +4 / -0 )

As a niche market, the high-end, high value crops (like these strawberries) bring rewards for smaller farms / companies / workers, but have little impact on Japan's desired goal of approaching at least 50-60+% food self-sufficiency.

The second case is the bigger answer and hats off to Yokota-san for his frank opinions and the decisive manner in which he is building his farming enterprise.

An agricultural revolution combining new thinking, new technology, new laws and a discarding of the outdated monopolistic system of govt / JA cronyism farming, is certainly necessary to attract the minds and bodies of future agriculturalists.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

The strawberry guy is so high end that he's not representative of anything that can be significantly scaled up.

The rice grower is representative though. Japan has lots of tiny farms using mechanization (factory farming) without the scale required to make it economic. So you have a farmer with three fields and a four million yen combine harvester that gets used for twelve hours a year. The same goes for his planter. His tractor might get used for seven days. We are all paying for it.

One of the biggest stories in Japan in the past week or so is a large independent melon grower who has been sabotaged by someone who initially messed with his equipment but eventually then went the whole hog and killed his crops with herbicide. From the initial shock at this happening, the focus on social media (yes I know) has shifted to the growing suspicion that this is the work of another farmer or farming insider angry at the grower leaving JA and selling his melons direct to customers. Apparently there have been comments along the lines of "what do you expect if you don't go along with the group" that indicate some people think the farmer brought it on himself.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Japan may want to consider designating existing rice field properties as "green belt zones" similar to those near cities in the USA. No housing, etc. can be built on existing agricultural lands. An ALT warned about this intrusion in a presentation of Chief Seattle's (State of Washington) message asking the USA government in the 1800s to protect the land his ancestor's lived on. It didn't happen because the USA has millions of acres to farm.

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@kohaku

the later part of your comment was very interesting.

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Being a farmer in Japan is the only job you get paid for doing nothing. I'm surprised the parasitic NEET generation haven't caught on to this yet. They should be flocking to the rural areas in droves!

This 'tech savvy' theme of the article is somewhat obscure. Singapore turned city rooftops into hydroponic gardens over a decade ago and, which now supply 80% of the country's vegetable needs. Japan has a long way to go to be 'tech savvy' at farming.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

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