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

[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

[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*.

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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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

[sideslash]

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

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: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.

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: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.