Category Archives: Agriculture

Increase of milk cow in Vietnam.

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The other day I met Mr. Ichikawa who does agriculture in Hanoi. Base company of his business is West Development Agriculture which is the largest company in Japan with large scale farming. Currently Mr. Ichikawa works as resident officer in Vietnam and working at around the north of the country to start mass rice farming project. Well, but even they say “the largest in Japan”, it is 600 hectares. In here, we say “well, anyway let’s try with 100 at the beginning”. I guess there is a bit of gap when they say large and when we say large in Cambodia.

Then, Mr. Ichikawa told me something interesting. Export of milk cow is increasing in Vietnam. Vietnamese were not drinking milk but they start drinking it suddenly and domestic produce can not keep up with the demand now. So they import a milk a lot. But of course domestic product is an ideal, so number of companies are start importing cows by bulk.

I actually have been studying the relationship of GPD/population and meat consumption for a while. And well, if I just wrap it up that the conclusion is that “If people become kinda rich, they start to eat a meat”. But when we I say “kinda rich” means that the people who could be out of poverty and with the GDP of 5,000USD to 20,000USD. In rapid growing Asian region, most of the countries will be in this zone in next 10 years. So, thinking only about Asia, some big change is coming soon.

Population of Asia is 3.6 billion by the way. Meat consumption of us, the Asians, are 27 kg / person a year (Only Japanese which has high GDP would be 48kg). Asian population are estimated to reach 4.5 billion and meat consumption are estimated to be 35 kg.

3.6 billion population X 27 kg of meat will expand to 4.5 billion X 35 kg. This must give a significant impact.

And of course we are eating “live stocks” but those live stocks are eating feed grains. Simply saying, we are in fact converting feed grains into meat and then eating them. Then this conversion efficiency is extremely low.

1kg of beef = 11kg of corns

1kg of pork = 7kg of corns

1kg of chicken = 4kg of corns

Until now, such low in efficiency luxury was only for the people in developed countries. For example, if we do not use corns as feed grains to produce meat that consumes in the U.S, we can feed 800 million people. Raising a meat (I mean cow or pork, you know.) cost a lot. So, we are indulging ourselves in such a luxury of eating a meat and now it will be not only for someone but for everyone on earth. This is the new era we will be living.

When I heard about Vietnam from Mr. Ichikawa, I give myself a compliment and say “See? my hypothesis of when citizen becomes rich enough, way of food consumption dramatically changes and increase a number of live stocks was right!”. And then, rapid increase of number of milk cow means that there will be a sudden increase of demand for feed grains. Regard to this I as well have been thinking and have some hypothesis but it will be too long, so I will tell you next time.

 

Transgenic Crops

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Genetically modified crops seems to be giving bad and scary picture to people. Since I am not a scientist, I don’t really know if it’s actually bad or not. But even though all the scientists from all over the world inform that GM crops does not have bad effect to humans, we probably still won’t be able to eliminate our negative feeling and will never take them as happily, don’t we?

I had no idea why they modify their crops until I actually engage into agriculture. I was thinking that it simply increases harvest yield, and sounds as if body builders inject themselves a steroids to make themselves bigger. But it’s actually a bit different.

So, what is that for then? First, modified crops has stronger resistant to pest. Second, it also has stronger resistant to herbicide. Notorious Monsant product is well known for example.

Then I realised after I have started doing agriculture myself that weeding is so damn hard work! It is almost like, I should be just focusing on weeding than growing any crop. It can be extremely attractive deal if weeding becomes easy task, especially for a commodity crops we grow which sells by ton and decreasing a cost is the winning factor, unlike some fruits crops like mangoes or strawberries or tomatoes that we can put the price on what we spend to take care of them.

GM crops and a cocktail of herbicide that doesn’t effect to the GM crops is such dream innovation for farmers. This is just a fact and we can’t deny. We can reduce a cost of labours or time and it even reduce a risk of health hazard with herbicide on labours. I know that organically grown crops are popular and ideal. And, Yes. I want to purchase something that are grown without any agrochemical and done weeding by hand. True. But when it cost a lot, it turns into a price. Such product becomes high in price of course. So, if cost of producing a crops should not be turn into a price, but the world demand “the product that cost a lot of human hand yet cheap”, it actually means that they allow modern time slave who “labour extreme work with cheap pay”.

But most can’t see this logic.

 Unlike simple vegetables that won’t be consumed in mass amount, the crops that are used for animal feed, that will be needing in big amount as current underdeveloped countries in the world economically grows and begin to intake much more meat product, or the crops for the other sector that cost lots of them in amount at a time can not turn the cost into the price easily. If economy is growing and demand is increasing but price is staying as the same, it means that someone is on a burden and taking a toll. Right? And that burden lead to price cutting war on either  “scientific innovation that has unclear future” or “modern time slave labours”.

Of course, price cutting war should be going on always, since it will be our, consumers, benefit. I am hoping to add another solution on these two unhealthy choice of burden. How about something like robotic farming? which robots do the work instead of human labours currently do. It’s the most needed innovation for agriculture sector I think. Umm…but I hope I can think of some way that we can do weeding better and cheaper and safer.

The consideration of the limit of agriculture by human power

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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.

AGRIBUDDY β version has launched!

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Yesterday my son turned to 1. At the same day we have released β version of AGRIBUDDY, Agriculture data control service for under developing country, with Google Play. We struggled to develop it for 1 year and half but finally we did it.

2010, I have moved to Cambodia. And 2011 the next year, I and Jiro who is my partner and co-head and other team mates established HUGS. What we put our hands on right after the establishment was agriculture. I literally run around jungles in Cambodia to find ideal land to do farm and found 1000 hectares of land. We cultivate it and was getting ready to begin real farming. However, the result was so Cambodia like. We were thrown into the situation of “Sorry! I do not understand at all but there is no one to put responsibility on”. I don’t write a detail because it is too complicated but anyway, It costed significant amount of cash to cultivate and we were not able to use the land at all.

I could not stop there. Never. So, I changed the strategy to cultivate a forest into a farm. I found some land to rent. Then we started cassava farming in nearly 1,000 hectares of land, again. We divide the land into 25 hectares each and positioned dozens of farm managers and hundreds of labours in each plot. And let them work various tasks at the same time. A size of the farm was vast. There were number of plots. Farm managers send us some report. We could know what is happening but we couldn’t “understand” what is really going on. It was such a dilemma. I continue the operation wondering how others are controlling their farms. To be honest, I couldn’t even tell where I actually was in the farm at that time. It was hard time physically and mentally.

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As I struggle, flood that occurred in 2012 attacked east of Thailand and West of Cambodia brutally. The flood of course reached to our farm which expand to the border. Farm was devastated and the emails that farm managers looked spam mail because so many mails are sent to me  from all the managers reporting the damage with pictures.

This picture, that picture, all were capturing a flood.

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I could tell that there are damage. But I could not understand where is actually damaged and how bad. I know it is like “Oh my gosh. Something is just so wrong.” Sure yes. But I could not understand the situation with precise numbers or amount at all. I told our manager to draw a map so, it might be easier to understand.

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I just told myself “No way. I will never be able to do farming properly”.

“Why no one wonder this is wrong? Why no one question this inconvenience and try to change?”.

Well, I thought that there must be some cool thing or service for this. I searched. There were couple of things that is close to what I envision but even though the service wasn’t that significant they were charging a lots of money or some seems to require lessons to just start using. Nothing satisfied me. Then as I continue my search, I realised that IT innovation in agriculture is progressing way too slow compare to other industries. When they say high-tech innovative agriculture, it is like automated vegetable growing factory thing that completely ignoring where the reality is.

Anyway, the foundation for some cool innovative engineer to develop some goodies with well usability was not existing in agriculture sector. When you come right down to it, some service developed in Silicon Valley seemed good but they could not function well in the underdeveloped country where I do farming. Why? Because premises itself in developed countries and underdeveloped countries is just way too different. Education level, moral and needs are just way too different. When I can’t even find the service that function well in developed countries, of course I could not find any service that can function in underdeveloped country, where with the people never once connected to internet.

Ok. Well, then why don’t we develop the system then!? If we are struggling, there must be someone else that are having same problem. If these farmers in underdeveloped country continue doing farming in this way without taking any data or whatsoever, it won’t take them anywhere and never increase their harvest yield. If I can develop something in somewhere that no one is yet to put their hand on, it probably create huge value. Then, AGRIBUDDY was born.

Now, we are at the start. I say, we just have reached to the start line. At the beginning, I was thinking to complete my business in here in 5 years and move to somewhere else. But my plan didn’t work at all. In last 4 years, there weren’t any success but only disappointments, failures, struggles and reglets I was experiencing. However, my challenge never ends. I have just started my new challenge. Well, let’s roll.

To be honest. No one wants to work.

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Since Cambodia is agrarian country and practice buddhism in general, they celebrate buddha related holidays such as new year or “Bon ancestor festival” as same as my country Japan. We can tell that a culture or a religion has been together with an action of eating because the timing of such religious events are matched absolutely with some time schedule of agriculture activities. Cambodia celebrate their new year in April and this is the beginning of rainy season. And September, which they celebrate Bon ancestor festival, is the time they have most rain falls. And beginning of November has water festival. This let people know the end of rainy season. I always have a headache in Cambodia because nothing can be on time and always delaying on schedule. But such religious events are perfectly linked to the season and never delays. It is just amazing to see our ancestors’ knowledge and practice.

Well, anyway. From the end of September, Cambodia has Bon ancestor festival with 3 days holiday then rash of another holidays coming in, which is a nightmare for the people who do business you know. We are forced to work only half of a week every week in October since there are holidays in the middle of each week. And then we have a finale of holidays by having 3 days off of water festival + weekend + independence day + make up holiday (You know because independence day is on weekend). Do a math. Well, but “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”. I just have to follow what our ancestors set up.

And then, I need to hurry up to prepare some documents for Mr. Kato’s speech at Tokyo Daigaku University which will be coming in next week. So, I called to our manager Socheat during his “holidays” and went to our farm to do some video shoot. It seems like he was happy to come out. Probably even Cambodian get boring during that looong holiday, huh?

This time I asked funky and cool Takamatsu who owns his private movie company called Studio Zarusova to do this. Well, as soon as we got off from our truck, I could feel the sun sting my head. And sure, the shooting was so damn hot and hard. Takamatsu said “Even if it is not Cambodian labour, no one want to work under this sun, you know.” Sure. I totally agree. Before I was complaining like “You know what, When I am not looking, they just trying to rest and not work but demand pay raise!”. But now I respect and almost worship them and in my heart saying “I am sorry I was being an immature and stupid authority to complain how you work. I just can not do what you do. Never.”

To be honest and serious, I think we will never find any human who can enjoy and find a joy or satisfaction to work under that sun living in a less than house like with such cheap pay.

So, what is the solution then?