Precision Farming and Its Potentiality

The characteristic features of Japanese agriculture are rice production and its highly mechanized small scale farming system due to the limited land space. Agricultural production system in mechanization has been currently changed from mass production system to flexible manufacturing system, which became already much popular in industrial production one. This can be explained that the target crop for mechanization has been shifted from majority crop (rice) to minority crop such as vegetable and fruit because of the overproduction problem of rice and its production control policy, successful completion of rice mechanization, and the rapid development and distribution of computer technology. Agricultural robots and precision farming have a great potentiality not only to change the agriculture, but also to solve many problems even for global issues. Precision farming should be normally applied to huge scale farming from the viewpoint of its efficiency. It looks almost impossible to apply both precision farming and agricultural robot technologies to Japanese condition due to the typical reasons characterized by small scale farming and low efficiency caused from the scale demerit in application, because it is generally said that at least more than fifty hectares area of farm land is needed for the efficient and effective application of precision farming. In this paper some of the examples of agricultural robot application and its possibility are introduced, then the idea how the precision farming combined with agricultural robots can be applied under Japanese condition is introduced, and proposed for the potential collaboration project among Inter partner University.