SENDAI, Miyagi Prefecture – An agricultural cooperative in Sendai (JA Sendai) will implement a plan to facilitate the use of farmlands damaged by the March 2011 tsunami by consolidating them and acting as a go-between for farmland owners to lend them to different types of farmers, JA Sendai officials said.
JA Sendai hopes to coordinate farmland use so that the land can be used efficiently by large-scale farmers, part-time farmers, small family farmers and self-sufficient farmers, as well as being managed as corporate farms, community farms and allotment gardens, they said.
In the coastal region of Sendai city, 1,800 hectares of farmland – 1,600 hectares of which are rice fields – were struck by the 2011 tsunami. Planting resumed in 1,400 hectares of the land, but for the rest of the land, farmers are having difficulty resuming operation independently, as they are burdened with devastated farmland, loss of equipment and facilities and lack of manpower.
JA Sendai plans to introduce the scheme, named the 21st Century Rice Field Agriculture Challenge Plan, in Ido district with 73 farms operating 100 hectares of land and Arahama district with 189 farms managing 180 hectares of land, where full-scale farmland consolidation is expected to begin this fall.
The cooperative will collect farmlands provided for leasing, divide them into sections fit for different types of farming like buildings for rent and set up communal facilities for processing and other works, as well as allotment gardens, altogether within the grounds, with the intention of managing the farmlands comprehensively, the officials said.
JA Sendai first created the plan in 2004 to intermediate between landowners and farmers individually, but it did not work well because of the difficulty to find borrowers. It decided to resume the plan this year because it received many requests from farmers after the tsunami to take initiative in farmland management, and also because the plan coincided with the Sendai municipal government’s plan to restore the area.
Akihiko Kudo, professor of Tohoku University’s Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences who supervised the planning of the scheme, said that JA is best suited to the task of an intermediary for farmland leasing and borrowing as the organization is highly trusted by farmers, adding that the social significance of such coordination is increasing especially in areas hit by tsunami.
“When deciding on how to use the collected farmlands, it is important to create a mechanism which takes into consideration farmers’ ideas in order to make use of unique characteristics of each region,” Kudo said.
Yukiya Kogasaka, an official of JA Sendai’s disaster recovery assistance division, said that JA plans to create a farmland management model based on the challenge plan and apply it also to mountainous areas faced with increasing age of farmers.
(July 2, 2013)
Yukiya Kogasaka (right) and a JA official look at a map and discuss specific plans for farmland management in Sendai.