Short version:
I saw fields from the Shinkansen during my trip to Japan at the end of April, the fields seemed too small for large equipment and the type of farming I’ve seen in America, why is this?
Long version:
Recently got back from a trip to Japan, during which I took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Sendai. I feel like I spent my entire 2 week trip marveling at what I was seeing and looking out the window I’d the train was no different. But then I started to notice that the fields of crops I was seeing were rather small.
I don’t know much about farming in general, mostly things from Clarksons farm, farm simulator and my dad went to college with someone that owns a strawberry farm. The farm sections I saw appeared to be too small and not optimized for the type of tractors and equipment to plow or work the fields as you’d see in America. Each field was separated by what seemed to be wire fence and the fields did not appear to be able to be flooded the way rice paddies would.
Again, I’m talking about fields you could see from a Shinkansen going from Tokyo to Sendai and this was at the end of April this year.
I’m curious as to if the size of fields has to do with traditional farming practices, like the size is how big a field most farmers could take care of hundreds of years ago and due to ownership laws or whatever farmers couldn’t buy neighboring farms to create larger fields? Maybe is it due to the type of crops being grown? Is it an effort from the modern (as in for the last hundred years or so) government to allow many people to own farms and prevent mega farms from forming? Or maybe (probably) it is some other factor and I have zero clue why the fields are smaller?
Any insight would be appreciated! I learn so little about rural Japan life, I’m very interested and Google wasn’t great at providing results for me. Thank you very much!
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/13o03ad/why_are_agricultural_fields_in_japan_so_small/
6 comments
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My two cents: Flat land for farming is at a premium in this mountainous land because it competes with people wanting to live there. The somewhat insane industrialization of farming that occurred in the US, where you had to go big or go home, didn’t happen here. So there are smaller fields with smaller machinery. I’m sure there are more things that play into this as well that I’m not thinking of.
I’m just going off what I read awhile back, but postwar the US divvied up farmland. Basically took larger tracts from wealthier landowners and gave small plots to farmers who previously worked for the landowners. Plus my town has very randomly placed small rice fields because I’m assuming over the years, farmers retired/gave up and sold it off to get turned into parking, housing etc.
If you are talking about rice fields, they have to be flooded to grow rice and keeping them small makes the flooding, draining and maintenance much easier.
If the dam of one of the fields breaks, you are only at risk of losing a very small fraction of your crop. Re-flooding a field that got accidentally drained is also faster on a small field so the risk of losing the crop is lower.
One answer is not a lot of flat areas. There are some teeny-tiny fields in some places that can only be cultivated by hand push tillers/harvesters. Needless to say these are slowly being abandoned.
But even in places that are flat, you’re right that fields are relatively small. And they could be bigger. I think the issue is disparate ownership. Before mechanization people could only farm small plots so holdings tended to be small, even in flat areas. There are efforts by the government and farmers to address this by consolidating ownership and creating larger fields.
They are rice fields, not cereal crop fields. They flood them around this time of year and it transforms the landscape. Before that they just look like very small regular fields, but it’s a very intensive farming practice, so those small fields will be very productive in harvest. The fields you see in America are far more extensive.