Japan's young farmers pin hopes on technology to revitalize agricultural industry

YAMAMOTO, MIYAGI PREF. – A new breed of younger, business- and tech-savvy farmers is transforming Japan’s shrinking agriculture sector with cutting-edge techniques and marketing strategies, giving new hope to an industry in slow decline.
Hiroki Iwasa, a 40-year-old IT entrepreneur with an MBA, grows strawberries in seven high-tech greenhouses where computers set the temperature and humidity to optimal growing conditions and ensure the rows of bushes are sprayed with water at precise times.
He markets his Migaki Ichigo-brand strawberries directly to fancy department stores in Tokyo, where they go for as much as ¥1,000 apiece, as well as to customers in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand, where Japanese produce has an excellent reputation.
Such changes, while small, come as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushes to reform the nation’s hidebound farm industry, where small-plot holdings still dominate, the average farmer is over 66 years old and the sector’s contribution to the economy has fallen by 25 percent since its peak in 1984.
They should also make Japan more resilient if the United States tries — as Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has hinted — to pry open Japan’s markets for rice and beef, which are protected by tariffs.
Iwasa was running an IT company and working on an MBA in Tokyo when his coastal hometown of Yamamoto in Miyagi Prefecture, an area famous for strawberries, was hit by the March 2011 tsunami.
He rushed to help with relief efforts and later saw an opportunity to combine his tech skills with the specialized know-how of a local farmer.
He now heads six-year-old GRA Inc, which has 20 full-time employees and 50 part-timers, including four dedicated to managing overseas orders.
“Farmers’ intuition and experience may not always result in a good harvest. So it’s crucial that we capture that as explicit knowledge in technology and automation, and use that to increase productivity,” Iwasa said. “Also nurturing professional farm managers is needed.”
By leasing surrounding land, Iwasa expanded his farm to 2 hectares, which is about 10 times the size of an average strawberry farm in Japan.
Such larger-scale agribusinesses, many using new technologies, are the future, said Kazunuki Ohizumi, professor emeritus at Miyagi University who has been studying farming trends in Japan for decades.

“Large-scale farmers are the ones to revitalize Japan’s agriculture, which will be changed significantly,” he said. “Of course, IT, robots and artificial intelligence are needed. They will generate jobs to handle such technologies.”
The shift is already underway toward company-run farms, whose numbers jumped to 20,800 last year from 8,700 in 2005.
The number of younger people working in agriculture is slowly rising. The farm industry added just over 23,000 workers under the age of 49 in 2015, up from less than 18,000 five years ago.
Ohizumi predicts that sales from large farms — those with more than ¥50 million in sales — will rise to about three-quarters of total sales by 2030, up from 41 percent in 2015.
Shuichi Yokota, a 41-year-old rice farmer in Ibaraki Prefecture, said Japan’s rice farmers have been protected by government subsidies and tariffs for too long.
Japan imposes a hefty ¥341 per kilogram tariff on imported rice, outside of its World Trade Organization tariff-free obligations, while the government offers subsidies of up to ¥105,000 per 0.1 hectare.
Farmers should aim to become just as globally competitive as the country’s famed car brands Toyota and Honda, Yokota said.
“If you fail business management, you have to leave. It is the same in other industries,” he said. “If you cannot lower production costs or secure clients, you will go bankrupt.”
When Yokota became a farmer after graduating from college 20 years ago, his family had about 16 hectares. As older farmers in the area retired, he started leasing their land.
He now oversees a 140-hectare rice-farming corporation, far bigger than the average 3-hectare farm.
The company grows several different varieties so that planting and harvesting are spread out, and uses electronic sensors to measure water levels and temperature in the paddies as well as the condition of the rice.
“Government subsidies will have to end eventually, as they are not sustainable,” Yokota said. “Farmers should produce goods that have a market. 

The future of agriculture is computerized

What goes into making plants taste good? For scientists in MIT’s Media Lab, it takes a combination of botany, machine-learning algorithms, and some good old-fashioned chemistry.
Using all of the above, researchers in the Media Lab’s Open Agriculture Initiative report that they have created basil plants that are likely more delicious than any you have ever tasted. No genetic modification is involved: The researchers used computer algorithms to determine the optimal growing conditions to maximize the concentration of flavorful molecules known as volatile compounds.
But that is just the beginning for the new field of “cyber agriculture,” says Caleb Harper, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Media Lab and director of the OpenAg group. His group is now working on enhancing the human disease-fighting properties of herbs, and they also hope to help growers adapt to changing climates by studying how crops grow under different conditions.
“Our goal is to design open-source technology at the intersection of data acquisition, sensing, and machine learning, and apply it to agricultural research in a way that hasn’t been done before,” Harper says. “We’re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant’s experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction.”
In their study of basil plants, which appears in the April 3 issue of PLOS ONE, the researchers found, to their surprise, that exposing plants to light 24 hours a day generated the best flavor. Traditional agricultural techniques would never have yielded that insight, says John de la Parra, the research lead for the OpenAg group and an author of the study.
“You couldn’t have discovered this any other way. Unless you’re in Antarctica, there isn’t a 24-hour photoperiod to test in the real world,” he says. “You had to have artificial circumstances in order to discover that.”
Harper and Risto Miikkulainen, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, are the senior authors of the paper. Arielle Johnson, a director’s fellow at the Media Lab, and Elliot Meyerson of Cognizant Technology Solutions are the lead authors, and Timothy Savas, a special projects assistant at the Open Agriculture Initiative, is also an author.

Maximizing flavor

Located in a warehouse at the MIT-Bates Laboratory in Middleton, Massachusetts, the OpenAg plants are grown in shipping containers that have been retrofitted so that environmental conditions, including light, temperature, and humidity, can be carefully controlled.
This kind of agriculture has many names — controlled environmental agriculture, vertical farming, urban farming — and is still a niche market, but is growing fast, Harper says. In Japan, one such “plant factory” produces hundreds of thousands of heads of lettuce every week. However, there have also been many failed efforts, and there is very little sharing of information between companies working to develop these types of facilities.
One goal of the MIT initiative is to overcome that kind of secrecy, by making all of the OpenAg hardware, software, and data freely available.
“There is a big problem right now in the agricultural space in terms of lack of publicly available data, lack of standards in data collection, and lack of data sharing,” Harper says. “So while machine learning and artificial intelligence and advanced algorithm design have moved so fast, the collection of well-tagged, meaningful agricultural data is way behind. Our tools being open-source, hopefully they will get spread faster and create the ability to do networked science together.”
In the PLOS ONE study, the MIT team set out to demonstrate the feasibility of their approach, which involves growing plants under different sets of conditions in hydroponic containers that they call “food computers.” This setup allowed them to vary the light duration and the duration of exposure to ultraviolet light. Once the plants were full-grown, the researchers evaluated the taste of the basil by measuring the concentration of volatile compounds found in the leaves, using traditional analytical chemistry techniques such as gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. These molecules include valuable nutrients and antioxidants, so enhancing flavor can also offer health benefits.
All of the information from the plant experiments was then fed into machine-learning algorithms that the MIT and Cognizant (formerly Sentient Technologies) teams developed. The algorithms evaluated millions of possible combinations of light and UV duration, and generated sets of conditions that would maximize flavor, including the 24-hour daylight regime.
Moving beyond flavor, the researchers are now working on developing basil plants with higher levels of compounds that could help to combat diseases such as diabetes. Basil and other plants are known to contain compounds that help control blood sugar, and in previous work, de la Parra has shown that these compounds can be boosted by varying environmental conditions.
The researchers are now studying the effects of tuning other environmental variables such as temperature, humidity, and the color of light, as well as the effects of adding plant hormones or nutrients. In one study, they are exposing plants to chitosan, a polymer found in insect shells, which makes the plant produce different chemical compounds to ward off the insect attack.
They are also interested in using their approach to increase yields of medicinal plants such as the Madagascar periwinkle, which is the only source of the anticancer compounds vincristine and vinblastine.
“You can see this paper as the opening shot for many different things that can be applied, and it’s an exhibition of the power of the tools that we’ve built so far,” de la Parra says. “This was the archetype for what we can now do on a bigger scale.”
This approach offers an alternative to genetic modification of crops, a technique that not everyone is comfortable with, says Albert-László Barabási, a professor of network science at Northeastern University.
“This paper uses modern ideas in digital agriculture to systematically alter the chemical composition of the plants we eat by changing the environmental conditions in which the plants are grown. It shows that we can use machine learning and well-controlled conditions to find the sweet spots, that is, the conditions under which the plan maximizes taste and yield,” says Barabási, who was not involved in the study.

Climate adaptation

Another important application for cyber agriculture, the researchers say, is adaptation to climate change. While it usually takes years or decades to study how different conditions will affect crops, in a controlled agricultural environment, many experiments can be done in a short period of time.
“When you grow things in a field, you have to rely on the weather and other factors to cooperate, and you have to wait for the next growing season,” de la Parra says. “With systems like ours, we can vastly increase the amount of knowledge that can be gained much more quickly.”
The OpenAg team is currently performing one such study on hazelnut trees for candy manufacturer Ferrero, which consumes about 25 percent of the world’s hazelnuts.
As part of their educational mission, the researchers have also developed small “personal food computers” — boxes that can be used to grow plants under controlled conditions and send data back to the MIT team. These are now used by many high school and middle school students in the United States, among a network of diverse users spread across 65 countries, who can share their ideas and results via an online forum.
“For us, each box is a point of data which we’re very interested in getting, but it’s also a platform of experimentation for teaching environmental science, coding, chemistry, and math in a new way,” Harper says.
The research was funded by Target Corp., Lee Kum Kee Health Products Group, Welspun, Sentient Technologies, and Cognizant Technology Solutions.

This Japanese “Duck” robot replaces pesticides in rice fields

For rice farmers, ducks have been a viable way to keep their crops healthy instead of harmful pesticides. Specially trained ducks are released into the paddy fields and feast on insects and weeds, which allows the rice crops to grow. They also eat the weed’s seeds, preventing the new weeds from growing around the plants, their manure even acting as additional fertilizer.
Now, an engineer working for Japanese carmaker Nissan has built a robot alternative to paddy field ducks, a low-tech solution into a sustainable one to help farmers reduce use of herbicide and pesticide on the rice crop.
The duck-farming robot is about 60 centimeters square (shaped like a robotic vacuum cleaner) and weighs around 1.5 kilograms. The robot will help oxygenate the water by stirring it up with two rubber brushes mounted at the base of its feet which will prevent weeds from taking root.

It’s fully equipped with GPS to navigate the fields and a WiFi connection. It works on- solar power to minimize its environmental impact.
Tetsuma Nakamura, the Nissan Engineer built this robot to help his friend. Watch the video of the robot in action. Unfortunately, there are no English subtitles to fully explain what we’re watching. Still, it’s an interesting robot that manages to mix both old and new agricultural technologies.

He is now testing his prototype in Yamagata Prefecture, northeastern Japan, reports Nippon.com. It looks like it is a personal DIY project with no plans for commercialization. They have not provided any data on how effective it is but it is an interesting utilization of technology.
The robot replicates processes used in nature, and since robots do not get tired, it could make these processes more efficient. Besides, it could potentially solve some problems in Japan such as its declining population and shortage of workers.

Thailand pushing smart agriculture

The Thai government will apply Japanese agritech to upgrade Thailand's community-based tourism and tackle poverty among farmers.
Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands, is known for breath-taking scenery, onsen hot springs and ski areas. However, it is also known for its advanced agricultural technology and ecotourism.
Agriculture plays a large role in Hokkaido’s economy, with a quarter of Japan’s arable land located on the island.
In terms of production, the island ranks first in. It produces a range of agricultural products, including wheat, soybeans, potatoes, sugar beets, onions, pumpkins, corn, raw milk, beef and many other products, including more exotic crops.
Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister stated that the Thai government will be applying Hokkaido’s development of technology for the farm and tourism sectors to upgrade Thailand’s community-based tourism and tackle poverty among farmers.
The leader recently led officials from the Industry Ministry, the Board of Investment (BoI), the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) and the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) to visit Japan in early November.
He noted that Thailand should learn to use more advanced technology in the agriculture sector because the country has become an ageing society and is facing a shortage of young workers in the sector.
The state-owned BAAC has been tasked with seeking out solutions to support smart farmers and offer soft loans to enable them to apply smart machinery in farming such as drones, which help cut costs and provide better health for workers in the farm sector.

Since acquisition costs for smart machinery in the farm sector are relatively high, the government is working to design proper solutions to entice more machine manufacturers to lower their prices.
The BoI has been assigned to devise investment packages in the agriculture segment that can attract more investment in machinery manufacturing.
The Secretary-General of the BoI stated that tax perks are now available to the farming industry from upstream to downstream, covering agricultural product processing, organic fertiliser production, and breeding development both for plants and animals.
The BoI revised tax privileges for the agriculture sector in September, offering a corporate income tax exemption for 5-8 years to smart farming businesses such as software design and data analysis for management.
Existing entrepreneurs in the farm sector who want to upgrade their products to international standards such as food safety ISO 22000 are also eligible for a corporate income tax exemption for three years.
The BoI reported applications for investment in agriculture and farm product processing amounted to 49 projects worth a combined 9.5 billion baht in the first 10 months this year.

The TAT will now be joining hands with the BAAC to promote agriculture-based and community tourism, similar to Hokkaido, creating a linkage between the farm and tourism sectors.
Thailand can apply Hokkaido’s farm and tourism development to upgrade community tourism and generate revenue in the agriculture sector.
Hokkaido has successfully created a linkage between tourism and the farm sector, attracting 235,000 Thai visitors in 2018.
The Managing Director of Hokkaido-based Smart Agriculture Division stated that said Japan needs speedy restructuring in the farm sector and has applied technology to increase productivity in order to supplement the smaller workforce of young farmers. In Japan’s ageing society it is essential for the country to accelerate using high technology.
OpenGov Asia reported earlier that the Digital Economy and Society (DES) Ministry and the Thai branch of an American multinational technology company would establish an artificial intelligence (AI) lab to cater to the farming sector and the smart city project.
The project lets users link with the firm’s research lab, where they can access intellectual properties from around the world that can be shared. The nation’s experts believe that smart agriculture is the way forward, and it will be aided by AI.

Hydroponics revolutionizes agriculture in Japan

Yuichi Mori, a Japanese researcher, has revolutionized agriculture through the development of transparent polymer films made from a permeable hydrogel, which can store liquids and nutrients where plants can grow without the need for soil. The device was originally designed for renal dialysis treatment.
In addition to allowing fruit and vegetables to grow in any environment, the technique consumes 90% less water than traditional agriculture and does not use pesticides, since the pores of the polymer block the passage of viruses and bacteria. The products obtained in vertical agriculture are fresh, locally grown, can be harvested throughout the year, are free of pesticides and are not affected by bad weather, say their advocates.
His company, Mebiol, has patents for this invention in almost 120 countries. This invention represents an authentic agricultural revolution in Japan, a country with a shortage of arable land and a lack of labor.

Polymer cultivation, as done by Yuichi Mori, is practiced in more than 150 locations within Japan, but also in regions such as the United Arab Emirates desert. The method is also being used to rebuild agricultural areas in northeastern Japan that were contaminated by substances brought over by the tsunami after the great earthquake in March 2011.
The Japanese government seeks to attract young people who have little interest in working directly in the field by using agricultural technology, in an attempt to revive a key industry that increasingly has fewer people. In almost a decade, the number of Japanese agricultural producers has fallen from 2.2 million to 1.7 million and their average age is 67 years. Only 7% of Japan's active population is employed in the field, and most farmers work only part-time.
Japan's topography greatly limits its agriculture. The country can only produce 40% of the food it needs, as nearly 85% of the territory is occupied by mountains and most of the remaining arable land is dedicated to growing rice. High technology, therefore, has allowed the expansion of crops without soil. In fact, Japan has been able to expand its production of fruits and vegetables through its production in greenhouses and hydroponics, increasing their productivity by up to one hundred times compared to conventional crops.
Despite the high energy cost of hydroponic agriculture, the number of such factories in Japan has tripled in a decade and there are almost 200 facilities nowadays. The hydroponic market is growing worldwide and it's currently worth about 1.5 billion dollars. According to the forecast of Allied Market Research, it is expected to multiply by four by 2023, reaching 6.4 billion dollars.

As high-rise farms go global, Japan's Spread leads the way

  In the hills between Kyoto, Osaka and Nara prefectures, surrounded by technology companies and startups, Spread Co. is preparing to open the world’s largest automated leaf-vegetable factory.
It’s the company’s second vertical farm and could mark a turning point for vertical farming — keeping the cost low enough to compete with traditional farms on a large scale.
For decades, vertical farms that grow produce indoors without soil in stacked racks have been touted as a solution to rising food demand in the world’s expanding cities. The problem has always been reproducing the effect of natural rain, soil and sunshine at a cost that makes the crop competitive with traditional agriculture.
Spread is among a handful of commercial firms that claim to have cracked that problem using a mix of robotics, technology and scale.
Its new facility in Keihanna Science City will grow 30,000 heads of lettuce a day on racks under custom-designed lights using light-emitting diode. A sealed room protects the vegetables from pests, diseases and dirt. Temperature and humidity are optimized to speed growth of the greens, which are fed, tended and harvested by robots.

Fixed prices

“Our system can produce a stable amount of vegetables of a good quality for sale at a fixed price throughout the year, without using pesticides and with no influence from weather,” said Spread President Shinji Inada, 58, in an interview at the company’s first facility, in Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture.
Inada won the Edison Award in 2016 for his vertical-farming system. He expects the new factory, called Techno Farm, to more than double the company’s output, generating ¥1 billion in sales a year from growing almost 11 million lettuces.
About 60 percent of indoor-farm operators in Japan are unprofitable because of the cost of electricity to run their facilities, according to the Japan Greenhouse Horticulture Association. Most others only turn a profit because of government subsidies or by charging a premium to consumers for vegetables that are chemical-free. Spread sells lettuces for ¥198 a head to consumers, about 20 to 30 percent more than the normal price for conventionally grown varieties, according to Inada.
Consumers pay the premium because the pesticide-free vegetables are increasingly seen as an alternative to often more expensive organic foods, which must be grown outdoors in soil. Japan’s hot summers and high humidity also make organic plants more vulnerable to insects and diseases, said Yasufumi Miwa, an expert at the Japan Research Institute.
“Producing organic vegetables requires extra-hard work by farmers and that should be reflected in the prices,” said Takumu Okuma, spokesman for online food supplier Oisix ra daichi Inc. “Pesticide-free vegetables are seen as safe by consumers and accepted by them as a substitute for more expensive organic ones.”
Small-scale vertical farms have been operating in Japan since the 1970s, predominantly as niche players that took advantage of high prices for fresh food in cities in a nation that imports about 60 percent of its food. But it wasn’t until 2010 that the sector began to expand rapidly, with the adoption of energy-saving LED lights and a government program to support innovative farming with subsidies, according to the association.
Spread’s Inada, a former vegetable trader, founded his company in 2006 and opened his first facility the following year in Kameoka. The company spent years refining systems for lighting, water supply, nutrients and other costs. The plant finally turned its first profit in 2013.

Techno Farm

Its new Techno Farm, expected to open as early as this month, will push efficiency further, yielding 648 heads of lettuce a square meter annually, compared with 300 heads at its Kameoka farm and only 5 in an outdoor farm. It will use only 110 milliliters of water a lettuce — 1 percent of the volume needed outdoors — as moisture emitted by the vegetable is condensed and reused.
Power consumption per head will also decrease, with the new factory using custom-designed LEDs that require about 30 percent less energy. A collaboration with telecoms company NTT West on an artificial intelligence program to analyze production data could boost yields even more.
Spread doesn’t disclose the cost of producing lettuce at its farms, but Japanese researcher Innoplex estimates the cost to produce one head of lettuce at its existing Kameoka building is about ¥80 — among the lowest in the world. The Japan Research Institute expects production costs at the new Techno Farm to come close to parity with outdoor farms within about five years.
But extreme weather events and climate change, major disrupters of traditional agriculture, are making vertical farming competitive even sooner. Japan’s hottest-ever summer this year, with its heavy rains, typhoons and flooding, sent supermarket lettuce prices soaring to more than double the level at which Spread sells its products.

Climate change

“Climate change is affecting food production almost everywhere, and the economics of growing and selling produce is affecting everyone,” said Dickson Despommier, emeritus professor of Public and Environmental Health at Columbia University, who has been promoting the idea of vertical farming since the 1990s. “If we don’t do something soon to reduce the rate of climate change, vertical farming may be our last hope of getting food on the table for all those who live in cities.”
Around the world, many existing vertical farms are located in climates that are inhospitable for vegetable farming and have high transport costs to import fresh produce, or in places where pollution concerns created a demand for “clean” food, such as in China.
In Antarctica, where weather conditions prevents shipments of supplies for much of the winter, scientists at Germany’s Neumayer Station III harvested their first batch of indoor lettuce, cucumbers and radishes this year to feed the station’s staff. And in space, astronauts grow food on the International Space Station in a minifarm nicknamed Veggie.
Some commercial ventures have targeted wealthy nations in the Middle East as prime candidates for vertical farms because of the high cost of importing fresh produce. Dubai’s Emirates Flight Catering plans to begin construction next month of a 130,000 square foot (12,000 sq. meter) vertical farm to supply airlines in a joint venture with California-based Crop One Holdings. The $40 million facility is expected to deliver its first vegetables to airlines and airport lounges in December 2019.
Other high-rise farms have appeared in office towers or condos as part of the design. In Tokyo’s Ginza shopping area, stationery retailer Itoya tends a vertical farm on the 11th floor of its 12-story building to supply lettuces exclusively to its cafe, at a cost that would be uncompetitive with vegetables grown in outdoor farms.

Greenhouse rivals

One of the biggest challenges to the wide-scale adoption of vertical farms is the rise of massive greenhouse-based operations outside cities that employ many of the same technologies — such as the U.K.’s Thanet Earth, which grows millions of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers a year under glass. While these farms need more land, they harness natural sunlight, reducing power costs.
In Japan, where the workforce is aging and many companies have relocated production overseas, vertical farms can also be built in idled factories.
JX ANCI, a wholly owned subsidiary of JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy Corp., plans to build an indoor farm in its Narita plant by 2020, using Spread’s system. And Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Co. has agreed with Farmship Inc., a Tokyo-based startup established by a former Spread employee, to build an indoor farm that would grow 32,000 lettuces a day in Fukushima Prefecture.
The real race though, is to go global. Spread plans to export its farming system to more than 100 cities worldwide, competing with companies such as Crop One, U.S.-based and SoftBank-backed Plenty Inc. and Sanan Sino-Science of China. Inada said Spread has signed an agreement with a food producer in the UAE to supply its system, and is holding talks with about 300 other companies and researchers.
“We are targeting countries where fresh vegetables cannot be produced because of scarce water, extremely low temperatures or other natural conditions,” Inada said. “Our mission is to provide infrastructure for vegetable production to anybody, anywhere in the world.”

Japan's 'agri-tech' farming revolution

 TOKYO-Japan's high-tech agricultural businesses are to gather at the Agri World trade fair held in Tokyo this week (Oct 12-14) to showcase the industries next generation of technologies such as plant factories, robotic automation and IT systems, claimed as advancing the "fourth industrial revolution" into the sector.
Business analysts forecast the "agri-tech" market is primed for extensive growth internationally over the decades ahead. As global population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, food needs would require a doubling of agricultural production, state U.N. World Food Programme experts.
Offering technological solutions, "agri-tech" businesses are marketing a wide variety of products and services for meeting industry demands, to generally increase productivity, lower costs, use less resources such as energy, water and pesticides, and improve produce quality and availability.
There is also a strong demand for labor saving and assistive agricultural equipment driven by a different demographic trend, that of ageing agricultural farmers, whereby according to U.N. figures, in developed countries the average age is 60, and where in Japan it has risen to 67.
Overall Japan has a shrinking agricultural sector, demonstrated by government data showing the number of full-time farmers at 1.7 million in 2014, declining from 2.2 million a decade earlier. Workforce and skills shortages are compounded by the lack of young people becoming farmers. Also, due to the increasing rate of farmers retiring, the overall amount of uncultivated farmland within Japan has doubled over the past two decades, increasing to 420,000 hectares in 2015.

  Japan's reliance on food imports is a further factor of concern, currently estimated at 60%, prompting recent government targets for boosting domestic production to 55% by 2050. Agricultural production at present is valued at around 1 trillion yen of which the government aims to increase to 10 trillion yen by 2020, raising food self-sufficiency as a major agricultural policy.
Another government initiative is 4 billion yen budgeted over the year through March for promoting farming automation technology in order to raise crop yields and make-up for workforce deficits. Specifically, the financial subsidy supports the development of 20 robot types, such as devices which separate over-ripe fruits during harvesting, to enable large reductions in manual farm labor.
As physical activities bring more difficulties for a greater number of aging farmers, technological innovations to assist with and replace workers performing agricultural tasks is an urgent priority.
Japanese tech companies are heavily investing in agricultural technology as a big opportunity for profits in both domestic and global markets such as India and the APAC countries, attracting small scale start-ups to big corporations such as Mitsubishi, Fujitsu, and Panasonic, to name but a few.
There is also a trend for farmland in Japan to be cultivated by "business farmers" and "agribusiness," at around 50% today, leading to 80% by 2025, according to government estimates.
As an indicator of growth potential in the "agri-tech" sector, the global market for agricultural robots is projected to reach $73.9 billion by 2024, up from $3 billion in 2015, predicted by Tractica, a market intelligence firm. Driverless tractors are trended to gain the highest revenue at $30.7 billion by 2024, with agricultural drones comprising the most amount of units shipped.

The applications of farming technologies are wide ranging and often interconnect. A typical farm scenario could involve a driverless tractor in a rice paddy field utilising a global positioning system, both synchronised to automate cultivation and fertilization after monitoring the soil conditions.
For work that is harder to be automated, wearable robotics put on like a backpack have been designed to assist harvesting and carrying produce, more so for elderly and female farmers.
As well as automating work, high-tech farming technologies provide accurate information which farmers can use to make decisions managing crops. For example, a combination of high resolution drone images, historical weather data from geo-satellites and sensors in the field would generate real-time alerts on mobile devices to inform farmers when to reduce a mandarin orchards water supply, so the trees absorb less water from the soil, therefore increasing sugar levels of the fruits.
The valuable experience and techniques of veteran farmers could also be more accessible to newer farmers via the web, such as learning resources about harvesting times with databases and photos.
Many news items about "agri-tech" businesses have featured in both the Japanese and international media, with reports of indoor "vertical farms" and automated greenhouses gaining the most coverage. There is often a focus on robotic automation, also the use of IT systems and sensors to measure and control growing processes, evidently enhancing work efficiencies, crop yields and produce quality.
For example, GRA Inc is a medium-size Japanese business with an automated indoor greenhouse facility producing strawberries, providing a reliable quality and increased supply all year round.
The company joins conventional farming expertise and technological innovation, employing local farmers as advisors and management, founded by a former IT administrator turned agriculturalist.
Based in Miyagi Prefecture, the business started a few months after the Tohoku disaster. In an area famous for its strawberries, thousands of greenhouses were destroyed and damaged ensuing huge losses for farmers. The business has therefore helped to modernise and revitalise regional trade.
Such stories show the real potential for young tech-savvy farmers to work alongside older, more experienced farmers, toward overcoming the challenges confronting Japan's agricultural industry.