In conjunction with the meeting of G-7 farm ministers, Japan’s agriculture minister Hiroshi Moriyama discussed his idea “of replacing retiring growers with Japanese-developed autonomous tractors and backpack-carried robots,” said Bloomberg. It said Japan plans to spend $36 million through March 2017 “to promote farm automation and help develop 20 different types of robots including one that separates over-ripe peaches when harvesting.”
Roughly 9 percent of Japan’s farmland — more than 1 million acres — lies uncultivated, a consequence of retirement of the nation’s elderly farm population; the average age of a Japanese farmer is 67 years. The amount of fallow land almost doubled in the past generation, according to the Agriculture Ministry.
“Aging farmers are threatening the sustainability of agricultural communities in Japan as the population globally is expanding and raising the need to boost food production to meet demand,” Moriyama said in opening the G-7 meeting. The largest maker of farm equipment in Japan, Kubota, has developed an autonomous tractor for use in rice paddies, said Bloomberg, and two other manufacturers are working on autonomous tractors and harvesters.
Japan imports half of its food and its 1.5 million farms typically generate low incomes, averaging $5,000 a year, said Yutaka Harada, a senior fellow at the think tank Tokyo Foundation in a 2013 paper. Many farms are very small and rely on off-farm income and pensions, he said. Some 878,000 farms had incomes of less than 1 million yen a year, compared to an average household income nationwide of 5.48 million yen. Agricultural productivity could rise with good policies in place, he wrote.