One of my best friend “Kazu”, the CEO of Framgia, and I had a great time to discuss some issues, like we should consider what we can do by multiplying ‘developing countries’, ‘agriculture’, ‘and Information Technology’ for our future which we focus on. We started to consider deeply the issues of the agriculture with some numbers, then we finally had a conclusion, such as “it is impossible to complete the mission we should aim at for the agriculture by human power only”.
My company, HUGS Agtech, owned a cassava farm and its size is approximate 1000-hectare. Now, I have better idea how to explain how big this farm is, so let me introduce it now.
Usually, we make ridges to plant cassavas. The width of the each ridge is about 1 meter. Since 1 hectare is equal to 100 meters on four sides, there are 100 ridges in total and each ridge has 1 meter width and 100 meter length. Then, the total length of all ridges is 10 km because 100 meters times100 ridges.
Our cassava farm is 1000 ha. The total length of the ridges is 10,000 km because 10 km multiple by 1000. This number is actually equal to one-fourth of the length of the earth, which can be said that the cassava was planted from North Pole to the equator and we owned all of them by human power only!
Well, it is of course very hard to walk around on the field because it is muddy, not leveled well, other crops or weeds were there. It is kind of unbelievable that the workers were walking back and forth on the field to plant cassavas, to weed, and to fertilize. Though waking between each of the ridges about 200 meters is hard for me when the crops are growing well, I have no idea how hard for them to walk and work around with a weed injector or some baggage on his/her back. Well, I have finally and totally understood now why no one wants to do this job.
Cambodia has 400,000 ha of cassavas in total and it covers only 5% of the total farmland of Cambodia. If we calculate the total length of all the ridges with the same method I used earlier, about four million kilometers, which is equal to the length of five round trips of the earth, are used as the ridges of cassava fields!!! Then, the estimated number of the farmers in Cambodia is five million and if we estimate that 5% of them work as cassava farmers, there are 250,000 farmers in total who work for cassavas. Although it is regulated that each of them needs to manage 16-kilometer-ridge, it is obviously impossible to do that, and the reason…, you will understand it if you come to Cambodia in extremely hot summer for once.
Anyway, even with this simple calculation, we can get an idea that it is impossible to manage the increasing cassavas fields by human power. In addition, it is as clear as day that the agriculture in Cambodia, which counts on the low-cost labor fee, will meet its limit sooner or later. Well, it seems that searching a way to implement machineries and efficiency is “the royal road” we should go on, I think.