A number of rice producers have been forced to cancel rice seedling transplanting in some of their paddy fields due to damages caused by the Kumamoto earthquake in the territory of Aso Agricultural Cooperative (JA), where most of rice producers had already got prepared for the planting works.
Multiple huge fissures caused by the April 16 earthquake run in a paddy field. (Aso-shi, Kumamoto prefecture)
Shunsuke Takafuji, 43, who planned to grow rice in his 14 hectare farmlands in Aso-shi, cannot hide his disappointment saying “I am afraid seedling transplanting might be done only in the half of my paddy fields this year. Assuming the worst case scenario, it could be less than thirty percent.”
In the JA Aso area deadly hit by the second powerful earthquake on April 16, cracks caused by the quake are found in many parts of rice fields and farm roads. A lot of paddy fields cannot be irrigated because U-shaped trenches have been broken in many places by heavy tremors of the earthquake and aftershocks.
It is still difficult for farmers to figure out when they will rehabilitate their agricultural production. Some of quake-hit farmers tried to plant soybeans instead, but they found it impossible to do so in their rice fields subsided by the earthquake.