My Experience As A Rice Farmer

I’ve been inspired to write something for April Cools Club, and what fits better from my normal content than my experience rice farming in rural Japan!

For those who aren’t aware, in 2025 I spent January-July in Japan staying with my wife’s family. During that time we helped out on the family rice farm near Shuzenji in the Shizuoka prefecture. I unfortunately had to leave before the full harvest process was done but I’ll take you as far as I got and also try and share other insights I gleaned.

Unfortunately, while I thought I took a lot of photos it seems I’m missing things I would have liked to have captured for this. Where applicable there’ll be other sources and at least one video linked for more information.

Quick Farm Intro

The farm is primarily a rice farm, there’s no animals (ignoring the koi fish that were in the garden pond). There is a portion of a bamboo forest and space to plant non-rice crops so we also grow or harvest for consumption:

1. Bamboo roots
2. Mushrooms
3. Potatoes
4. Pumpkins/gourds
5. Carrots
6. Warabi - an edible bracken. Not so much planted it just grows everywhere
7. Whatever other vegetables they decide to plant

And looking out from the driveway this is the view at the end of winter before everything starts growing and spring properly kicks in:

Obviously, me and my wife aren’t around all the time. When we’re not my brother-in-law and mother-in-law work on the farm part time often 1-2 days per week each.

Preparation

At the start of spring we come back to the fields. They’ve been left fallow over the winter and the dead rice plants from last year cover them. They’re currently dry, we’ll flood them later on once they’ve been prepared. Because it’s hard and spiky we have cordless strimmers with metal blades to cut through this and not take forever.

I don’t have a picture of a rice field before clearing but here is one of the fields partially cleared:

As part of clearing and getting ready we also dig the drainage ditches along the side of the fields. When the fields were drained last year the soft mud flows back into the ditches and hardens again so they need to be redug.

The field will also be ploughed to break up the soil and loosen it, and we’ll remove large rocks we find. After ploughing we can level the field to flatten it. With the field level, the rice will be at equal depths and the planting process is more consistent.

This might be the first time someone’s prepared a rice field wearing a Rust London t-shirt. It’s definitely my first time driving a tractor!

But before we get that far we have to prepare the route for the water to get into the field. This work is only actually needed for one of our fields, the others have a fairly direct route from the river to the field. But for one field we have to clear a few hundred metres of a channel that goes along the edge of a bamboo forest clearing the dead bamboo and other natural detritus.

I don’t have any pictures of this, but imagine all the joys of clearing out hundreds of meters of ditches among dense vegetation in high humidity.

I do have a picture after ploughing with the drainage ditch for the field dug next to the river that will supply our water:

One last thing we might do before flooding is drive metal rods into the perimeter of the field as part of building a fence. This doesn’t have to be done for every field, just the ones that border the bamboo forest where the wild boar and deer might sneak through at night and eat the rice.

Water Water Everywhere

Rice fields are typically placed near rivers, before planting we have to flood and level the fields. We’ll go down into the river, and place a wooden board by a drainage pipe at the edge redirecting water down that pipe and into a channel next to the field. We can then open a hole and let water go from that channel into the field. Water can then drain out of the edge of the field when it gets full, continuing on into other fields and eventually back into the river. The water will rejoin the river in part so that farming doesn’t dry out rivers and ensure the longevity of the environment.

For the field with the more onerous ditch clearing that water flows under the field and eventually back into the river. For that there’s an ad-hoc construction of some old drain and bamboo to move the water across into the field:

And the water entering that field:

After flooding, a tractor with a flat rear blade will be moved over the field a few times to level it. When the planting vehicle goes over the field little arms pluck off some rice and stick it down. If the soil is too far from the arm you end up with loose rice floating around on top of the water. Obviously, we don’t want to waste rice like this so levelling is an important step.

One thing to note, with a rice field the deeper soil is compacted and firm, it shouldn’t be able to drain by the water going into the water table and disappearing. However, our field with the tricky water intake did suffer from a minor sinkhole as water was able to go down and rejoin the stream that flows under the field. This resulted in some work to dig down and fill the area letting water out with rocks and harder mud and compacting it with the bucket of a digger. After this work was done the field held it’s water and we were able to think about planting.

After poking around to figure out why water was draining I managed to get this picture of the hole that started to open up. I guess that’s a sinkhole of sorts.

An interesting fact is that rice doesn’t actually need standing water to grow. The water helps by stopping weeds growing around the rice taking resources and protects the rice from certain pests that would eat it.

For some further watching, this video shows a more advanced but very similar for a different farm. The main difference is that they don’t need to manually go to the inlet gates to open/close them and instead have some more modern gates controlled via mobile phone.

Planting Day

It’s planting day, turning up I can see the neighbours have already planted and here you can see our ready but empty field next to their freshly planted field:

But here we go, everything we’ve been working toward. The previous process has taken from mid-February and now it’s early May. We go off and buy seed trays of rice to load into the Rice Transplanter. Below you can see a picture of the planting process:

An arm will move along the bottom of the rice and pull off a clump of rice and then plunge it into the ground. It will keep moving back and forth doing this at regular intervals. It the motion of it working is reminiscent of a typewriter at work.

After it’s done there’s some leftover rice, and there might be gaps where things weren’t perfectly level. We go out into the field wearing jika-tabi. These are boots with a split between the big toe and the other toes. It’s meant to help our feet not get stuck in the wet mud. Grabbing rice in small bunches we pull them from the seed tray and plant them about an inch deep into the mud and compact some mud around it.

Fun language note, my wife asked me if I saw the tabi once and I thought she meant a tabby cat. I wasn’t aware of the name of the footwear.

Now the rice is in the field we’re at risk of attack. Wild boar and deer just love to snack on our hard work - this means it’s time to put up the electric fence. This is fairly simple drive the poles into the ground at regular intervals, then feed the wire along it wrapping it round the clips making sure it’s moderately taut. Also check for any breaks in the wire and if so get a bit of electrical tape and fix it.

After wiring we place a box which is just a solar panel and battery on a timer next to the fence and try to hammer it into the ground or prop it up securely enough with rocks where the dirt is too shallow.

We’ll have to come back every week or so to cut the grass that sprouts up on the edge of the field. If we don’t it will ground the fence and drain the battery and our rice will fall victim to the local wildlife.

After planting our fields look like this:

Draining Time

When the rice gets older - around waist height the field is drained. Some sort of narrow plough is moved between the rows pushing the mud up around the rice to hold it up and then the water intake is closed and the field left to drain and dry out. Then the rice will continue to grow until it’s harvest time.

Unfortunately, I left Japan a couple of weeks after draining and I haven’t experienced the final stage of harvest yet. I have this picture I was sent of the rice near harvest time but the final stages will have to remain shrouded in mystery for now. I’m not ready for spoilers when I may learn this in future firsthand:

Attacked!

A spectre has been looming over this post. The wild boar. I got an update one day it seems a baby boar managed to squeeze under an unelectrified part of the fence and help itself to an all you can eat buffet:

Luckily someone came to the farm the day before and the day after it happened and it was closed up before the boars started visiting nightly. But it seems important to remain vigilant of your defences. I’ve still not seen a boar in the wild even going through the nearby forests - they’re nocturnal and rather dangerous so I’m glad of that!

Local Fauna

In rice fields you can see a lot of interesting wildlife. Frogs and salamanders help protect the crop by eating bugs that might feed on the rice. You also might see snakes nearby that feed on them as well.

When clearing grass once I saw a snake dart out from under a pickup truck we’d had parked up for a few hours as I walked past. I then looked at the grass I was going to cut and saw it hunkered down in the grass but obscured enough to not get a picture and not wanting to disturb it I moved on. After all I don’t know how dangerous it might be.

I asked my brother-in-law about the snakes later on when he came to the truck to get a drink and asked if they’re dangerous. He asked if it’s brown or “blue” (aoi 青い) - it was brown. Also blue here isn’t blue but green, historically ao used to mean the entire blue-green spectrum so for some older terms (often things like animal colours), aoi is still used instead of the more modern word for green (midori 緑). Anyway, his response to my answer is how I first heard the Japanese word 有毒な (yūdokuna) - or venomous in English. Not speaking any English, he further translated it by grabbing his throat and miming frothing at the mouth.

There are also black kites flying around, they’ve been known to swoop down and snatch up kittens and there are warning signs in some more populated places about keeping close to small pets. I’ve seen them circling in the heat but it’s hard to get a good photograph of birds with a normal smartphone camera. But I have my best capture of one:

Economics of Rice Farming

When I was in Japan there was a rice price crisis (try saying that three times fast). With a 95% increase in price, it actually became cheaper to fly to South Korea, fill a suitcase with rice and fly back. Eventually, the government released part of its emergency rice supply kept in storage to tackle food shortages and mitigate against disasters. This situation is likely to occur again, and as an outsider looking at how Japan’s farming system is organised it seems unavoidable without significant reforms.

In Japan the average age of a full-time rice farmer is around 70. For younger generations they can only afford to do it part-time, 1 or 2 days a week. They also own 4-6 rice fields. There are no factory farms and large scale operations.

In this respect my wife’s family is very average. Rice farming doesn’t generate enough income to do it full time so my Mother-in-law and Brother-in-law only farm 1 or 2 days a week maximum. Without more time they’re able to just plant enough fields to account for the family rice consumption and not to sell rice.

Part of the reason of this is the Gentan system, designed to protect small-scale farmers income it prevents large scale factory farming of rice and encourages ownership of smaller farms. It has been officially abolished but it still shapes how the rice economy works. This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting. It should be noted the UK’s system is like this with rich landowners accumulating more farmland for tax reasons and renting it to farmers who often struggle to make farming profitable.

Farmers also sell their crops via a centrally managed system which fixes the price. Historically, crops used for animal feed have fetched higher price than human quality rice leading to a number of farmers planting rice for themselves and then selling animal feed to make a living.

Another issue is automation of farming. Reading this account of rice farming you might think this seems very manual and it is. In America rice is aerially planted. With consistency in fields and the distribution of the rice leads to higher yields. And if you’re dealing with such small farm area that becomes more important - and things like aerial planting become less economically viable. An American farm can be roughly 100 times larger than a Japanese one.

Additionally, with rising cost of living a lot of the youth of Japan move to cities like Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya where they can find better paid office work. Local rural economies struggle more as they lose people and income from work doesn’t scale with the costs of living. It seems unavoidable we’ll see more and more rice farms close and further impacts due to decreased output.

If you’re interested in this there’s a video about this on Asianometry.

Finally

Reading this last section it might seem to end in doom and gloom. This isn’t really how I wanted to sign off on things. Rice farming was a positive experience for me, a connection with nature, building relationships with my wife’s family and growing my Japanese skills. Doing a day of manual labour, chatting shit, then going for the onsen and some BBQ and beers is far better than grinding away at some enterprise SaaS that will probably disappear in a few years.

Farming becoming economically unviable seems to be something afflicting many countries. At some point I expect a wakeup call or transition. Either things are changed to make it viable full-time or Japan’s system of small independent farms will gradually fade away. Only time will tell, but I hope that rural communities can continue to survive and also thrive.