Title: Paradigm of value-driven and community-based precision farming

Authors: Sakae Shibusawa

Addresses: Faculty of Agriculture, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, 3-8-5 Saiwai-cho, Fuchu, Tokyo 183-8509, Japan

Abstract: This paper describes a Japanese model of community-based precision farming and learning groups of farmers and companies. The community-based precision farming is a new regional farming system to get high profitability and reliability under regional and environmental constraints, promoted by wisdom farmers and technology platform, through creating both information-oriented fields and information-added products, with supply chain management of field to table. Two participating local learning groups are: a technology driven ||Precision farming network of Toyohashi-Atsumi (PFNET)|| in Toyohashi city and a farmers| learning group ||Honjo precision farming society (HPFS)|| in Honjo city. PFNET is aimed at realising a total system of technologies in precision farming with agriculture-linked industries and wisdom and skills of farmers. HPFS (Honjo) strives to produce information-added products and information-oriented fields, and also grows them as new Honjo branded products. The first action was a market research on information-added products through in-shop experiments.

Keywords: information-oriented field; information-added products; innovation; business model; learning groups; community based precision farming; technology driven precision farming; regional farming; Japan; precision agriculture; small-scale farms.

DOI: 10.1504/IJARGE.2004.006042

International Journal of Agricultural Resources, Governance and Ecology, 2004 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.299 - 309

Published online: 23 Jan 2005 *

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