What I did last week -- Farmer Justin

So finally I've come around to what I've been wanting to write about since last week but never had the time to do. So here I go....

So last week, I was invited out by a volunteer friend of mine to hit the rice fields and go plant rice. What a trip! My friend, as it turns out knows another friend that is the owner of a rice paddy and is currently going through the planting process (as it is rice planting season now in Japan). The interesting thing about this place is that they do all their work by hand!

From what I am told, nearly 99% of all rice fields in Japan are mechanically planted. The rice field that I went to is sort of different, in that it isn't a commercial production place. The owner of this rice field, Shigeo, plants the rice here purely for self consumption. He does it with friends and I believe they get a cut too.

Shigeo is a very interesting person, somewhat shorter than I and weighing at only 100 pounds, if you were to look at him, you could never guess that he was underweight. He looks incredibly fit. Trained as an economist at university, he worked in Germany for several years getting developers permits to build golf courses-- the kind of things that would get enviromnentalists screaming in a rage. Yet, I have a guy that worked in a development firm running in his own rice field.

Actually, Shigeo also runs a bit of a club called (translated from Japanese) "Let's plant rice" and his motto is to "think in 100 year terms." Quite a contrast between a guy that worked at a company developing golf courses and the same one running a rice field, no?


So this is me with my hands and feet dirty in the rice field with the rest of them.

Let me explain a little about the rice planting process.

After the winter season, the rice paddies are drained and from October till about the end of April the fields are often left alone with vegetation growing in it. Before planing, the excess vegetation is removed to allow for the rice plants to get the most nutrients out of the ground.

In the old days, removal of plants was done by hand and that's the way Shigeo does it. In the present, it's done by tilling and chemicals. The reason being it's more efficient (a word that "work" has a love affair with). In the modern rice fields, the paddy is pumped full of fertilzer and growth chemicals to get the rice to grow big and into a snice grain shape. The telling price we pay is that because of the chemical contents of the paddy, the farmers them selves don't enter their own paddies in bare foot like the way we are in the picture above. The long term effects of these chemicals to the rice aren't well understood and could take many years before anyone notices. What I do know however, is that there is a multitude of life in rice fields that I was planting in... like snails and small bugs... in the other rice fields, there aren't any.

So I ask Shigeio what are the advantages of farming in this manner since it takes longer to plant the rice, he tells me that the taste is a little better (but that could be a subjective thing) but the most important thing is that he tells me that, safety of the food is the most important property. Unfortunatly, the economics of producing safer foods don't play to a farmer's hand. The farmers want efficiency, whatever health problems that might develop long after you've been eating the rice for a long time is the price that the consumers might end up paying for later on.

I did learn something interesting from Shigeo that day, something that I've never considered before... he told me that "that trying to find ways of doing things in the most efficient way possible isn't necessarly the best." The thought more correctly summed up in my opinion is that "other important properties/qualities should not be sacrificed for efficiency."

So that concludes the rice planting talk, so on to other things.

The other interesting things that Shigeo does is that he also grows Shitake mushrooms. Ever wonder how they're grown? First you take some fallen trees, drill holes in them and put in bits of Shitake mushroom spores in. Close up the hole with some styrofoam and in about 8 months you've got Shitake to eat!

Shitake, this one's ahead of the pack.

What a farm of Shitake mushrooms looks like.

Shigeo's living room:

His house designed by his wife


Lunch at Shigeo's: Farmed rice and veggies picked from the forest. Delish!


The farming gang. The guy to the most left is Shigeo.

Aftre getting home, the birthday party where a few people got plastered occured, but in general we all had a good time.


Left: People hanging out in Kuni's Room
Right: Crap, I forgot her name! Note, it's very bad to forget a girl's name!


Toshi falling asleep on my bed after too many drinks.

Well that sums up a little of what went on last week... here comes another weekend! :)