Sensor Network Makes Life Easier For Japan's Aging Rice Farmers

szczys writes: The average age of Japan's rice farmers is 65-70 years old. The work is difficult and even small changes to the way things are done can have a profound impact on these lives. The flooded paddies where the rice is grown must maintain a consistent water level, which means farmers must regularly traverse the terraced fields to check many different paddies. A simple sensor board is changing this, letting farmers check their fields by phone instead of in person.

This might not sound like much, but reducing the number of times someone needs to walk the fields has a big effect on the man-hours spent on each crop. The system, called TechRice, is inexpensive and the nodes recharge batteries from a solar cell. The data is aggregated on the Internet and can be presented as a webpage, a text-message interface, or any other reporting scheme imaginable by utilizing the API of the Open Source software. This is a testament to the power we have as small groups of engineers to improve the world.

Comments

Labor reduction

[bluefoxlucid]

Fewer man-hours, more rice from less work, fewer farmers, less time spent working, less paid in wages, more produced, cheaper rice.

We still have people claiming value and wealth come from land, not from labor. Marx claimed more labor to produce a product meant more value and thus more wealth; I've outright demonstrated wealth comes from reducing labor spent on producing goods.

Then again, I abandoned theories of value when I started making my economic theories; I'm writing a theory of *wealth*, not an explanation of how something's inherent price comes along. Value was always a stupid idea with no place in macroeconomics.

Re:Labor reduction

[ShanghaiBill]

Fewer man-hours, more rice from less work, fewer farmers, less time spent working, less paid in wages, more produced, cheaper rice.

The way to get cheaper rice is for Japan to ratify TPP, kick these farmers off the dole, and buy rice from Thailand or Louisiana for a tenth the price.

We still have people claiming value and wealth come from land, not from labor.

In this case, it comes from neither. I comes from massive subsidies, tariffs, and artificial price supports.

Re:Labor reduction

[MarkvW]

Wealth comes from a lot of things.

Re:Labor reduction

[jader3rd]

I'm writing a theory of *wealth*

Is it called On the Wealth of Nations?

Re:Labor reduction

[bluefoxlucid]

The way to get cheaper rice is for Japan to ratify TPP, kick these farmers off the dole, and buy rice from Thailand or Louisiana for a tenth the price.

Labor may be overpriced; but you can't reduce costs by just reducing labor price. That's a large and important part of my economic theories--it's why I argue for a Citizen's Dividend to replace minimum wage (and our current welfare system), and why a progressive tax system is good--but the primary mechanism of improving wealth is decreasing labor invested in producing goods. Hunter-gatherers could only provide enough food to sustain, at an optimistic estimate, 136 million humans on earth, at a cost of 15-20 labor-hours per day per human fed; now we sustain 7 billion humans, at a labor cost of 27 labor-hours per YEAR per human fed.

In this case, it comes from neither. I comes from massive subsidies, tariffs, and artificial price supports.

That's mercantilism and protectionism, and it actually reduces wealth.

Re:Labor reduction

[bluefoxlucid]

Not really. I'm working on it.

Re:Labor reduction

[bluefoxlucid]

I was going to call it that, but the name was taken. Due to the principle of short names (shorter-named papers get more attention and generally draw more credibility), I titled it, "The Growth of Wealth", with the subheading, "A Treatise on the Origins and Development of the Wealth of Nations."

Re:Labor reduction

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Other anthropologists claim they worked much less, as little as 2 hours per day "oh woe the modern worker".

In any case, their nutrition was vastly low, as much larger humans grew with farming, and much larger still with a free economy that choked aisles with cheap food. So I am not sure how well their lighter workday was for them. And forget tv and phones and modern medicine.

Re:Labor reduction

[bluefoxlucid]

You're right; I keep quoting that per day, but it's per week. 15-20 hours per week. Sahlin and Richard Borshay Lee did studies on modern hunter-gatherer societies to refine their historical projections. It's around 4-6 hours per day.

The USDA Census from 2012 shows 3,233,358 farm operators in the USA. With a US population of 314,100,000 and an agricultural work week of 50 hours, that's approximately 27 working hours per person per year. The fifteen hours of food acquisition per person would total 245 billion hours per year, but the US only spent 8.5 billion hours on farming in total.

That's using the low projection of 2.14 hours per day. As an agrarian society, with modern, industrial farming methods and GMO crops, we save 237 billion hours of working labor time.

In theory, that means 3.5% of our population has to go to work getting food, rather than 38%-50%; in reality, comparing to a 40 hour work week where 15 hours goes to food, it's more like 1.3% of our population has to work getting food, rather than 38%-50%. Anhtropologists argue much of the remaining time was spent on food preparation, but don't always mention things like establishing security for the mud huts, child-raising, weapons and clothing manufacture, and so forth, all much more labor-intensive then (now we have school buildings and brick walls).

Re:Labor reduction

[ShanghaiBill]

Labor may be overpriced; but you can't reduce costs by just reducing labor price.

This is not just (or even mostly) about unit labor costs. Rice farming in Japan is incredibly inefficient. Japan does not have a good climate for growing rice. It is too cold, and the rains come at the wrong time. Land ownership is highly fragmented, so you see tiny little plots, far too small for normal farm machinery. So instead you see a 70 year old with a roto-tiller preparing his plot, and then later stooped over, planting individual plants by hand. In a first world country, that is an insane waste of manpower. If/when the subsidies end, these farms will immediately switch to producing high value fruits and vegetables, which are suited to the climate and require far less labor.

Re:Labor reduction

[bluefoxlucid]

This is not just (or even mostly) about unit labor costs. Rice farming in Japan is incredibly inefficient.

That's labor costs per unit. That's exactly what I said.

In a good climate with good soil, you may produce 6 tonnes per hectare of rice using a total 10,000 labor-hours. In a bad climate with bad soil, you may produce 2 tonnes per hectare of rice using a total 40,000 labor-hours. That means 1/3 as much rice, 4 times as much labor, 12 times as much labor per unit of rice produced. That labor includes agricultural workers, fertilizer manufacture, water treatment and transport for irrigation, power generation and coal mining for electricity to run the pumps, transport of fertilizer, and so forth. Reduce the amount of irrigation required and you reduce the amount of coal mined, the amount of water treated, and the amount of pumps used to pump water--reducing the labor invested. Reduce the amount of fertilizer, same deal. Get more out of the same land and these things multiply, because you're tending less land.

Again: You can't reduce costs just by reducing labor price. Kicking farmers off the dole, reducing their subsidies, reducing their working hour costs, and so forth will bring labor costs down, but only so far. If you want to reduce labor costs significantly in the long term, you must reduce invested labor hours per unit productive output.

That's what inefficient *means*.

Re:Labor reduction

[Applehu Akbar]

"The way to get cheaper rice is for Japan to ratify TPP, kick these farmers off the dole, and buy rice from Thailand or Louisiana for a tenth the price."

While it's true that Japanese rice is massively subsidized so that a small number of "medallion farmers" can continue selling it in an artificially controlled domestic monopoly that keeps low-cost competition out, this technology is applicable to any reasonably civilized country that grows rice, lowering the cost of production there.

It's bad enough that this legal model would be applied to a basic foodstuff, true evil would be applying it to the medications that people critically depend on.

Re:Labor reduction

[Harlequin80]

Except this doesn't solve the other issue which is Japan wants to have, as much as is possible, the ability to feed its population from domestic food sources.

Re:Labor reduction

[charrington]

Modern Japanese consumers refuse to eat rice from Thailand. They *may* eat rice imported from the US if it is the variety grown in Japan and tastes the same. There was a big shortage in the 90s and they tried importing Thai rice. Very few ate it. The variety is completely different and tastes completely different, and therefore is not seen as being "rice" by the typical housewife.

Certainly, there is need for reform, but this situation is a bit more complicated than you think. TPP passed anyway, though, so we'll see what comes of it.

Re:Labor reduction

[bjwest]

Is cheaper rice really a good thing though? What good is $1/lb rice over $3/lb rice when we have to spend an extra $8/lb to cover the social welfare costs so the farmers who formally grew the rice can afford to purchase that rice to feed their family?

Re:Labor reduction

[bluefoxlucid]

What good is $1/lb rice over $3/lb rice when we have to spend an extra $8/lb to cover the social welfare costs so the farmers who formally grew the rice can afford to purchase that rice to feed their family?

You're making a false dichotomy. Go back to colonial America--yes, that recent--and even England had no notable welfare system. England implemented old-age pensions and unemployment insurance before the United States, and unemployment insurance was hotly debated because of expense--with people citing old-age pensions as having worked out fine in support; now unemployment insurance is ... a tiny, tiny thing. Why do you think that is?

Our social welfare systems in America cost 1.5% of taxed AGI back in 1950--including social security. Back in 1790, such social welfare systems would have bankrupt America--not required 30% of our taxable money, but required 500% of our taxable money. That 1% income tax they levied in 1820 covered some extremely minor functions of government on a small body of people, without the costs of things like communications infrastructure, space-age military, interstate highways, ICBM launch silos, nuclear submarine programs, or military satellite systems. America's navy wasn't England's; wooden ships were expensive, but we relied on militia men and a standing army rather than infinite sea power, since well-armed galleons wouldn't stop invasion from our two fucking huge borders. A standing militia is cheap.

The fact is these systems of $1/lb rice over $3/lb rice have made enough excessive wealth for us to actually implement those social welfare programs and still come out richer. We were once a nation--once a world--of blacksmiths and farmers, with the blacksmiths mostly supporting the farmers with plows and scythes; now farmers are 0.25% of our population. We're reaching a point where our current-model welfare system--the social programs system--is growing out of control in cost, while minimum wage--a good system for the 1900s--is actually threatening to undermine the economy; and, at this point, we can implement a Citizen's Dividend system which will continuously reduce its minimum operating cost (I argue, as a matter of policy, to lock the financing sources and just let the minimum standard of living grow as our nation becomes more wealthy), eliminating both problems and completely ending homelessness and hunger forever.

That's what cheaper rice gets you. It's what every step in history has been: cheaper metal products (blacksmiths go away), automatic elevators (bellhops go away), more food from less land (lots of farmers go away), advanced low-cost materials like plastic (shipping costs drop because fuel needs go down, manufacturing labor drops, and lots of people in many sectors need new jobs), and so forth have steadily cut down the price of a T-shirt from $4,000 (479 labor-hours at $8.25/hr minimum wage, a la 1820, before the power loom entered wide deployment) to $15 (8.6 hours at $1.73/hr) and moved the labor elsewhere. That labor, moved elsewhere, does other things: we still have t-shirts, but we also have rockets that go to the moon, and social programs that keep people from starving.

improve the world by gutting jobs?

[Joe_Dragon]

improve the world by gutting jobs?

What happens when people have to start taking food from the farm to feed there family?

Re:improve the world by gutting jobs?

[ShanghaiBill]

improve the world by gutting jobs?

Prosperity comes from the production of goods and services, not by "keeping people busy". Japan has a declining population and serious labor shortages. Labor intensive rice farming in Japan makes no economic sense, and is only kept going with massive subsidies funded by taxing the productive economy.

The automation and sensors described in TFA are also stupid, since they just make a stupid system slightly less so. A far better solution would be for Japan to buy rice from countries with lower labor costs and climates friendlier to rice production. The the rice farmers in Japan can find productive employment. For instance, they could grow high value fruits and vegetables.

Re:improve the world by gutting jobs?

[bluefoxlucid]

Originally, the earth could support fewer than 136 million humans. We were working 15-20 hours per one person per day as hunter-gatherers, foraging food.

Today, we work fewer than 27 hours per YEAR to obtain food for each one person. We produce more food on less land. In 1970, India produced 2 tonnes of rice per hectare at a price of $550/tonne, scaling to over $3,000/tonne by inflation in 2001; in 1995, India was producing 6 tonnes of rice per hectare, and by 2001 the rice commanded a price of under $200/tonne. That means less labor invested in producing rice--in fact, under 6% as much labor per dry weight of rice (and per calorie!).

With all this free time, we built giant fucking rockets and sent men to the moon.

The total buying power of an arbitrary economy (including the whole universe, although we can theorize a single country like the U.S.) is the total productive output. This makes sense: you can only trade what is produced; and each thing requires labor-hours to produce. It eventually comes down to the minimum cost of labor, with a theoretical bound of however much it costs to keep that labor alive and functioning. That means the cost of labor required to produce food, shelter, clothing, and so forth, whatever your society has provided as "minimum standard of living", is your minimum labor cost.

Currencies hold the same buying power as total productivity. In the case of hard currencies--gold, silver, copper--the labor required to obtain more at any given time compares to the total productivity, which can radically destabilize the buying power of currency when gold mines open up (gold prospectors during the California rush were dropping sizable nuggets for picks and shovels). Fiat currencies are more stable and easily dealt with: they pay for labor, and come into issue by debt or central bank minting. The increase of currency in greater proportion than the increase in production is inflation; a slower currency increase than productivity increase is deflation.

The amount of currency in play is income. If you have $100 trillion but you only make business income and pay wages to the tune of $12 trillion in one year, the amount of currency is, essentially, $12 trillion. Income includes business profits and individual wages.

The buying power of currency, thus, is the total income divided by the total productivity. This lags because it's not a hard feature: it's an elastic market behavior which self-corrects, and so is prone to distortion (e.g. west-coast high prices, low suburban prices) and influence (e.g. cheap shipping means west-coast high prices become west-coast low prices as competition with east-coast cheap products delivers at lower labor costs or lower profit margins than west-coast products). It's also inherently arbitrary: although it self-corrects over time, we can most easily discuss it in more general terms such as the production and income of a fiscal year. You'll always have meaningful numbers, but never absolute, concrete numbers; understanding that limitation is critical.

The total wealth, on the other hand, is the total buying power divided by the total population--the per-capita buying power. Because of constant, absolute economic behaviors, this *always* increases. For one thing, if productivity can scale linearly with population--if 10% more labor-hours worked means 10% more of everything produced--then you can increase population without diminishing wealth. On the other hand, if you hit a super-linear cost situation--10% more labor-hours worked means 5% more of everything--people become poor, and the lowest laborers starve or require more buying power (not just more income, but income worth more labor). Raising the cost of low-end labor creates a sort of feedback loop which slows, then erodes, the economy, and so will tend to force people downward in living standard and put a firm psychological and financial halt to population expansion. This limit on growth is partly "So it is, so it's always been", but also will

Re:improve the world by gutting jobs?

[theNetImp]

You don't understand the situation here, and as someone who has visited the very rice fields this device is used in, I can tell you I've see this first hand. Japan is suffering a crisis right now where young Japanese want to live and work in the city. It is to the point where some small towns will give away houses to young families willing to come to the country side to live and work. There are job opportunities, but no one to fill them. A single person is doing the work of many. Not only are they doing more work, they are well into their 50s some even their 60s, and working all those fields as they age it is going to become harder for them to walk and work all those fields. With this technology it will help them do more with less.

Basically I'm saying... shut the fuck up about something you have no idea about.

Re:improve the world by gutting jobs?

[theNetImp]

The problem remains the same. You still need workers to work the trees, and most young Japanese don't want to do that they want to work and raise their kids in the city.

Re:improve the world by gutting jobs?

[Penguinisto]

It is to the point where some small towns will give away houses to young families willing to come to the country side to live and work.

Apropos of nothing, I would be totally down with filling one of those slots... but I suspect that as a gaijin, that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

Re:improve the world by gutting jobs?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

That's what you get for an engineered demographic collapse.

Re:improve the world by gutting jobs?

[charrington]

From a food security standpoint, gutting domestic production and buying exclusively from foreign countries is about the stupidest thing you could do, but It's easy to suggest by those who live in the US or Europe, areas that produce more food than they need.

Re:improve the world by gutting jobs?

[radarskiy]

If reduction in labor required for agricultural production could cause economic collapse, it would have happened by now since most of the reduction has already occurred.

Re:improve the world by gutting jobs?

[theNetImp]

You'd be surprised. Currently in the area around HackerFarm there are a few gaijin tech workers that work from home that have moved to there, and many of them help in the rice fields part time. If you have a valid means to get a visa then it wouldn't be hard for you to get involved.

Re:improve the world by gutting jobs?

[charrington]

I'll second the other reply to your comment. If you are actually interested in committing to growing rice, most rural areas would welcome you. It's a lot of work, and it's a serious commitment, so it's not for everyone, but if you have independent income (or are self employed and can work remotely), then it's an interesting lifestyle to try.

The locals, particularly the older farmers, have mostly come to terms with the fact that their way of life is dying, so even complete outsiders willing to carry on the tradition are welcomed. They base their trust on apparent commitment more than anything. If you work with them, cut the grass with them, plant the rice with them, they'll welcome you whole heartedly.

If only the Khmer Rouge had this tech...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

If only the Khmer Rouge had this tech...

Promote longer life? Not so fast

[sideslash]

Who is likely to live longer? A farmer who trudges out in the elements every day and works hard to keep his operation going, or a computer operator who sits in a chair and has so many things automated that there's almost nothing remaining that requires significant manual effort?

The way the summary is written shows some laughably naive understandings of human longevity. Farming is one of the most dangerous occupations, but I assure you that the aspects of hard work and being toughened by the elements are NOT bad for you, generally speaking.

rice

[JohnVanVliet]

the BIG question is
How much will there ISP / telecom charge for the wireless data plan needed ???
1 months wages ?
2 months wages ?
3 months wages ?
????

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[__aaclcg7560]

People who are active in their later years are more likely to live longer. My father retired to a trailer park. He helped a neighbor save money on county dumping fees by breaking down old vending machines, recycling the metals and cleaning up the wood. He gave the wood to a neighbor who built chicken coops for sale. He made $50 per month from the metals he took to the recycling center. That lasted several years until someone complained to the county and a county inspector declared that he was running an illegal recycling operation. He died about six months later, having nothing better to do.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[djupedal]

>The way the summary is written shows some laughably naive understandings of human longevity. For starters, yes, I agree. It seems more like a kickstarter pitch rather than a way to help anyone in general.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[sideslash]

Good on your dad for his initiative, and boo to overzealous bureaucrats.

japan has universal health care

[Joe_Dragon]

japan has universal health care

Re:japan has universal health care

[KGIII]

I'm completely and totally baffled - to the point of commenting.

I mean, yes, Japan has universal health care. That's true. Is this the only fact you know about Japan or something? I guess my point is that I'm not seeing what their health care system has to do with the comments made by the parent poster. You might well have just said that, "Japan is an island nation near China."

Maybe I am missing something? If so then please enlighten me. Perhaps it's a koan and I need to meditate on it.

Re:By phone, no, thanks.

[szczys]

In this particular situation many of the farmers have cellphones that allow texting but not smartphones or other Internet connections.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[ShanghaiBill]

My grandmother lived to be 102, and all she did in her later years was sit on her butt and post anecdotes to Internet forums.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[sideslash]

I'm guessing farmers who can afford water level sensors can also afford wading boots.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[__aaclcg7560]

Overzealous bureaucrats have their place. I'm more pissed off at the busybody who filed an anonymous complaint, ruining a good thing that benefited the neighbors.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[sideslash]

I told my mom once about a recently deceased centenarian in the news who had boasted about eating chocolate every day. Mom retorted, "Well, if she didn't eat it, she might have lived even longer." Moral of the story: you can never win an argument with your mom.

Re:By phone, no, thanks.

[theNetImp]

The area this is setup in doesn't have a nearby wifi source, and therefore mobile is the only way to go.

Re:Why those guys aren't retired anyway?

[__aaclcg7560]

Pretty soon no one in America can afford to retire. With the baby boomers retiring and the tax base (young workers) shrinking over the next 20 years, Social Security and Medicare will consume 2/3 of the federal budgets. Taxes will have to go way up to keep all those baby boomers in a comfortable retirement and pay for everything else.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[KGIII]

WOOHOO!!! I'm going to live forever!

Or a drone.

[clovis]

Well, that really does look cool, and one can see how it could be expanded to monitor other things.
Their solution to power and networking also could be used for something like a webcam for increased flexibility.
However, it looks like a variation of the "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" thought-process.

If I were in the position of these farmers, I would prefer a drone to inspect the fields.
With a human eyeball, you can spot the things that no one had thought would happen.
A failed drone can be easily fixed by ordering another one, or you can two on hand.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[__aaclcg7560]

You may very well live longer. Are you planning to live longer? Most people aren't planning to live longer than their parents and they don't have the resources to live such a long life.

subsidies

[Anonymous Coward]

Fewer man-hours, more rice from less work, fewer farmers, less time spent working, less paid in wages, more produced, cheaper rice.

The way to get cheaper rice is for Japan to ratify TPP, kick these farmers off the dole, and buy rice from Thailand or Louisiana for a tenth the price.

Is this before or after the US stops subsidizing corn, cotton, wheat, and rice?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_States

Ditto for Thailand:
* http://thediplomat.com/tag/thailand-rice-subsidies/
* http://www.ibtimes.com/thailand-rice-subsidy-scheme-what-it-how-it-toppled-thai-leader-yingluck-shinawatra-1792788

Perhaps the TPP should have looked at ending subsidies.

Canada got/gets a lot of flak for its supply-side management scheme, which sets production quotas, but it's one of the few countries where the government doesn't directly write a cheque to farmers--which will change if the TPP passes. Prices are (supposedly) higher because of the quotas, but it's a system where the buyers of the product directly support the farmers as opposed to the general tax payer doing it regardless of whether they buy dairy/poultry.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[__aaclcg7560]

My father retired at 59-1/2 years old. Mostly because his older brothers kicked the bucket after they turned 60. If he started his pension before he died at 60, my mother would have his pension for ten years. As it was, my mother died at 67 and my father died at 75.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[KGIII]

I was very fortunate and sold my business after the growth and maturation of said business so I could, quite easily, fund a number of lives. In fact, with investing, I make more now than I ever did and I only invest as a hobby or have a financial manager who invests my real asset portfolio for me. I do pretty well at it, too. The funny part is that I haven't a clue what I'm doing. For instance, I bought 2000 shares of Tesla when they were 1/10 their current value. (I just spend a lot of time reading and looking for trends - people liked Tesla and so I bought a bunch.)

So, yeah, I can. I don't really want to live too long and I surely don't want to live forever. I'm already a grouchy old man. I'd hate to see me in 100 years. It might be interesting but I'd expect I'd hate everything and everybody.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[__aaclcg7560]

Like the neighbor dismantling three or four vending machines in his driveway each week? Or the neighbor building a new chicken coop in his driveway each week? None of those are in violation of county regulations. Separating metals and cleaning wood apparently was. Go figure.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[Anonymous Coward]

Japan's farmers are old because Japan is a segregated society. Farmers, fishermen, and other manual laborers who's professions are considered 'unclean' are a subclass heavily discriminated against. (Don't believe me? Remember that story about google pulling historic maps so people could not look up and see if your ancestors were in the wrong profession so you could be shitlisted)

Nobody in their right fucking mind goes in to a profession like that so the youth don't replenish the workforce. It's literally better to be unemployed.

So why not import a bunch of immigrant labor? Oops. Sorry.You forgot about Japan's other massive inequality problem: pervasive, endemic xenophobia and racism. No foreign laborers working the fields like in the US.

Anyone else wonder why Japan's economy is spiraling in to the toilet? Why they've got an ultra-nationalist party on the rise? I sure don't.

Re:Why those guys aren't retired anyway?

[narcc]

Just cut military spending. Considering that we spend more than the next 13 highest-spending nations combined, I think we could do with a reduction.

Re:Sigh...

[narcc]

What's wrong with that? Very often, simple technical solutions can have a profound impact.

doing good doesn't mean you need to crow about your deeds as part of the process.

I don't read this as bragging. I read this as an inspirational message -- you can impact the world in a positive way. You don't need to make some revolutionary discovery or technology, just a few dedicated people with the right skills can make a big difference.

I also see a charge implied here: "Now go and change the world." I see nothing wrong with either of those things.

Too complicated/expensive of a solution.

[Khyber]

Toilets have held the answer for at least a century - float ball and fill valve. They don't require any specialized electronics, nor do they require power to run. Water levels get low enough, the float ball will trip the fill valve open and the paddy will get filled until the float ball raises up enough to close the fill valve.

Re:Too complicated/expensive of a solution.

[packrat0x]

You're forgetting:
"We've always done it this way".
and
"Tradition. Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as... as a fiddler on the roof!" -Tevye

Re:Too complicated/expensive of a solution.

[Khyber]

".A solar powered electronic device is not only easily replaced, but most importantly, can be put anywhere and give feedback while you're sitting on your couch"

And very easily stolen, too.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[JanneM]

Japan's farmers are old because Japan is a segregated society. Farmers, fishermen, and other manual laborers who's professions are considered 'unclean' are a subclass heavily discriminated against.

No. You're confusing manual labour - well respected, fishermen and farmers especially - with "burakumin", the old class of people that did work forbidden by buddhism, such as butchering, leather tanning and so on.

Discrimination of burakumin still exists, but mostly among the kind of people that worry their daughters will marry the "wrong sort" of people, and "wrong sort" also includes not having a foreigner in the family tree, not being a member of the right country clubs, having insufficient money and so on. The recent mayor of Osaka, for instance, is burakumin, but while there are many reasons to dislike him, I've heard of nobody doing so for that reason.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[charrington]

You are missing the point, though granted that is because the summary does not explain the full situation.

This tech is not so the farmers will say healthy longer or live longer. Farmers in Japan are old. The reason they're still farming at age 70 for instance is because their sons, who traditionally would have taken over the farm years ago, have moved into the city to take an office job and are never coming back. Certainly some are glad to have something to do and will smile and tell you they plan on doing it until they're 100 years old.

As the average age of farmers goes up, the amount of fallow land has also gone way up. They stop tending land in less ideal locations. Land that is harder to reach, where it is hard or impossible to get the tractor to, where the plot is on a slope - terraced and too small, land where it is more likely that wild animals can damage the crops because you're unable to monitor that field every day.

The TechRice program will be expanded to measure other factors. The specific aim of the program is to make the tending of more remote/less ideal fields more viable, both in terms of labor and in terms of economics. It's an experiment to be sure, and the passing of TPP today raises the bar on what it would need to achieve. Personally my hope is that the program goes on to cover small scale affordable robotics (weeding, protection against wild life, etc.) but that is still just a pipe dream.

Source: I'm one of the people who suggested the program.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[NormalVisual]

Or a marked stick for each paddy, and a pair of binoculars.

Re:Promote longer life? Not so fast

[volmtech]

For some people farm work keeps them healthy. My father worked full time driving tractors until he was 80. I did not inherit those genes and by the time I turned 56 my rotator cuffs were both torn and a few hours of driving would leave me in tears. I also lost use of my left hand and had to take SS disability.

I wouldn't trade glorious years of working outdoors for anything. I still live on the edge of one of fields I used to plow and it about kills me that I can't climb back in one of those big John Deere's when I watch them coursing back and forth.