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Experiences With Horticulture in Japan
113 Plays2 years ago
In this special mini episode of Hort Culture, Josh shares his experiences and impressions of horticulture in Japan. Thanks for listening!
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to Hort Culture Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
Mini Episode Announcement
00:00:17
Speaker
Greetings, hort culture podcast listeners. Hello. We are bringing you during this time of year where things are kind of busy. Um, we're trying to bring you a little episode to brighten your week, but also not take up too much of your time. Uh, to that end, I think we are trying to share what we call what a mini episode, Josh.
00:00:37
Speaker
Yeah. Correct. Okay. A mini episode. It's going to be small on the smaller size. So get out your, uh, audio microscopes. There's less people in it too. So yeah, it's just going to be me and Josh. Um, so if you haven't been, uh, irritated just yet, just wait, just wait. So bald boys only today, Alexis and Ray will have their own mini episode out. Um, what are we going to talk about, Josh?
Josh's Study Abroad Experience in Japan
00:01:04
Speaker
Uh, we were talking about horticulture in Japan.
00:01:07
Speaker
What would you know about that? Very little, no. Actually, probably, honestly, not a ton. However, I did do an independent study abroad there back in 2012, where I spent a better part of two months, or the growing season of 2012, down in southern Japan, very far southern Japan.
00:01:32
Speaker
uh for the geographers at home it was on the island of Kyushu which is the same latitude as coastal Georgia to kind of give you an idea of where that was in terms of plants and things like that and I was there working on um
00:01:50
Speaker
working on farms that were engaging in pork production, but because of the way that horticulture permeates the activity of people in agricultural communities in Japan, there was a lot of horticultural activity to see and engage in while I was there.
00:02:08
Speaker
And so you were there, this would have been at the tail end of when you were doing some re-schooling.
Value of International Agricultural Practices
00:02:15
Speaker
Remind us again on the very tight timeline your journey through this professional and educational life. Sure.
00:02:24
Speaker
I went back to school to get an undergrad in sustainable agriculture at the age of 29, around 2009. So this was, I believe, my third year of undergrad as a 32-year-old, something like that. And I was advised that study abroad would be a pretty cool thing to do, especially being somebody who has had some travel experience, stuff like that.
00:02:52
Speaker
and worked out an arrangement to do kind of an independent solo travel study abroad. And would you confirm that it was in fact a good thing to do?
00:03:02
Speaker
Yes, yes, I would confirm that there's a lot of options for study abroad. But and I think with agriculture, I had long been advised even long before I had gone back to school that the overseas agricultural experience can be very powerful to kind of see how other cultures solve what are essentially the same problems that we all face when it comes to working with nature.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah. And maybe their solutions are slightly different from the ones or very different from the ones that we put into those problems. So, uh, I'm feeling a little bit betrayed because this is supposed to be a hort culture, horticulture podcast,
Kagoshima's Agricultural Focus
00:03:43
Speaker
Josh. And you just said that you were there for pork. Correct. Which is not a plant.
00:03:48
Speaker
not a plant it is you know you can make the argument originally plant-based in a sense right it eats plants right uh eats plants and that was a feature of the kind of pork production they were engaging in was kind of foraging based pork and okay but
00:04:05
Speaker
You know, there was also a lot of horticultural activity where I was where I was. Kagoshima was the prefecture. They're known for two things as far as agricultural products. The pork production system that I was there for Kagoshima Kurobota, which is like Kagoshima Black Pig. But the other big one is they grow sweet potatoes there for a liquor, which is called shouju, which is also popular across like Korea and places. I've had some shouju.
00:04:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty good. Well, it does the job. So there was extensive... Sounds like there was a very in-depth study abroad experience based on what I'm hearing. Definitely, definitely. So there were sweet potatoes, but I'm guessing... Sweet potatoes everywhere. So do people in Japan eat vegetables? Yes. Do they grow plants? Is that part of... They absolutely do. Yeah, and that was one of the things that I noticed kind of first that was distinct from
00:05:04
Speaker
agriculture production here in the States is that there are many things, but kind of, you know, the perfect example would be, you know, looking out across this valley where I was working, which the farm was located in remote sites. There was a lot of traveling between locations where certain production things were going on. But in this valley, right, there were some valleys that were predominantly rice production, and then some that were predominantly sweet potato production.
Structure of Japanese Farms
00:05:32
Speaker
which around the kind of periphery of those places, there were also peanuts being grown. And if you had to ballpark sizes fields, not of not of sweet potatoes or peanuts. Oh, right, right. The average kind of size that I saw for the plots was about
00:05:51
Speaker
two to three acres. Oh, okay. Yeah, very small compared to the U.S. average. But also, I mean, large in a certain sense, you know, from a hand scale or, you know. Right. And it was very mechanically assisted. Like, let's just say for a field that is sweet potato production, right, everything was raised beds, black plastic, into these squares that were about one and a half acres, let's say.
00:06:18
Speaker
And for every eight of those blocks, let's say arranged in like a little square in the middle of those eight, there would be a block of the same size that was very high density, human scale, mixed vegetable production, tons of stuff going on in there. And that was specifically for the workers in those
00:06:40
Speaker
eight blocks of sweet potato productions would also have these little blocks for their own vegetable production, right? That they would work on every day and kind of collectively managed to take care of. So they always had fresh vegetables, which was similar to what we had going on, even though we were, so I should kind of back up and describe the farm a little
Echo Farm's Innovative Model
00:06:59
Speaker
bit. The farm has these multiple teams. There was like a pig team and that's what I was on. And there was a vegetable team and they grew vegetables for this restaurant and hotel.
00:07:07
Speaker
And even though I was on the pig team, we had our own vegetable production space for ourselves as employees to kind of supply our lunches and dinners with fresh vegetables and things like that. And every morning, I mean the first activity when we're all kind of showing up to the main HQ where we're figuring out what we're going to do for the day and how we're going to split up into teams to accomplish tasks.
00:07:31
Speaker
We all had to spend about like 15 to 20 minutes just maintaining the vegetable garden. And it was just kind of the ease into the day and everything was raised beds with tons of like straw mulch. So I have so many questions. One is, did the pig team and the vegetable team ever like play Red Rover or anything like that? Not while I was there. Gotcha. Feels like the pig team maybe would win.
00:07:55
Speaker
But the vegetable team from all the antioxidants and minerals might recover from their Red Rover injuries quicker. Possibly. They were... Anti-inflammatory. They were fewer in number than us. So we had like kind of a... I see. A size advantage. I gotcha. For sure. Well, so my other question and less important one is...
00:08:15
Speaker
So like you're, this is like a farm that you're working for or a business that you're working with. Like you say these teams, what are the teams part of? Are they?
CSA and Restaurant Partnerships
00:08:24
Speaker
Yeah. And so yeah, yeah. Go ahead and answer that. Sorry. No, that's, that's a good question. Cause it was, it took about a week and a half to put together what I was actually a part of. Nice. Even though I was in it working there every day. Is this a cold? Right. What is, what does it mean to be on the pig team? Yeah.
00:08:43
Speaker
So there were these teams, like I said, you know, the pig team, the vegetable team, there was also a restaurant and hotel team. And then all of these teams together were sort of fell under the collective heading of the name of the farm, which was it spelled eco farm, but they pronounce it echo farm.
00:09:01
Speaker
And Echo Farm, where the revenue came from for that, there was a CSA, but the members of this CSA were not individual households. They were restaurateurs or restaurant owners who would buy shares to receive produce, whether it was the vegetables or the pork. The pork was kind of the big selling point.
00:09:23
Speaker
And all of that echo farm was kind of a either division or subsidiary. I'm not real super clear on the corporate structure, but was a part of this regional local recycling corporation. And so it was all kind of like part of this broader land stewardship thing.
00:09:42
Speaker
That came into play a lot because we had access to tons of materials for building little structures and things like that. Like the headquarters where we met every day was this little compound that had all these bays of different materials and things like that that were, you know, part of the recycled streamline or waste material stream. Yeah.
00:10:06
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. Very, I could see why I took you a week and a half and figure it out. Right. I might take me a week and have to figure it out based on what I just heard. And I mean the restaurant and hotel team, that's because there
Cross-Skill Development at Echo Farm
00:10:17
Speaker
was, there were two restaurants on site and a hotel. And one of those restaurants was just for other employees. Um, and so, you know, had like discounted rates and stuff like that. Hmm. But you, so regardless of what team you were on, you had a horticulture component.
00:10:36
Speaker
Yes, totally. And they encouraged kind of cross pollinating between the teams. Like there were some people who worked in the restaurant slash hotel team who would spend some of their time in either the vegetable team or the pig team. And so that way there was this kind of sharing of skill sets and understanding of like what's going on.
00:11:00
Speaker
Wow. So like this may be a, maybe this is just a US concept, but you were you on the clock, so to speak, when you were doing the horticulture work? Yes. Well, I mean, it was the way it felt was like it was pretty much, you know, eight, like an eight to five day. And whatever you were doing was part of the thing. And I don't know. I mean, they didn't have a punch clock, but it seemed like it was much more like kind of salary oriented. I gotcha.
00:11:27
Speaker
Like, I think it was just to make sure if you stayed late, you know, you were gonna get extra for it. But there wasn't a culture of staying late. It was like, boom, five o'clock, we're out. Well, that's pretty cool.
00:11:40
Speaker
So do you, you know, we, we mentioned how, uh, or, and it's, I think it's become clear just in this little brief, brief conversation, the, the role of horticulture in this space is a little different. Any other kind of, uh, observations, particular observations about horticulture, has it played out there in comparison? So just a reminder to the studio or to the, to our listeners, I should say, we do have a live studio audience today. Shout out to Arundathi and my dog bear.
00:12:08
Speaker
Bears kind of checked out. Yeah, bears very disinterested, but I remember these men clapping silently
00:12:17
Speaker
So for our audience, to remind our audience, Josh, you've had quite a bit of experience working on vegetable, mixed vegetable, diversified farms in the United States. So you had that experience before. Right. So what are some of the things that you have any big takeaways? I see you have some notes over there if you have other things you wanted to share about the experience that I haven't prompted you into yet.
00:12:39
Speaker
Well, to kind of reiterate a little bit, oh, the other thing I should mention is that, uh, the pig team was also responsible for the rice fields, which was similar in size and scope, but more like an agronomic crop in the sense that it didn't require daily, uh, sort of, I mean, we would check on it, but it didn't require livestock or. Right. But I would say when it comes to the vegetable production systems I saw.
Resource-Intensive Sweet Potato Farming
00:13:08
Speaker
So.
00:13:10
Speaker
There's kind of two things going on. There's the sweet potato production, which I would say is they're very resource intensive kind of agronomic crop sort of looking thing where there's a lot of resources going into it. And it's a cash crop and, you know, kind of commodity style, probably because it's all just being fed into these distilleries. Right. And that was those systems where it was all raised bed and black plastic kind of production systems.
00:13:39
Speaker
just sort of what we associate or at least I associate with kind of larger scale vegetable production in the US and some places even, you know, in Kentucky or even with the CSA or something like that.
Natural Farming Techniques at Echo Farm
00:13:51
Speaker
Whereas the vegetable production system for Echo Farm, whether it was for the restaurant or for the employees was still a raised bed system, but everything, it was like a straw mulch kind of,
00:14:06
Speaker
deal and one of the things that was kind of this cross cultural connection was They when I went over there they had heard of and were big fans as well of One straw revolution Masanobu Fukuoka that kind of like oh, yeah thinking and methodology of approaching agriculture Which I wasn't necessarily my experience here in the States with
00:14:34
Speaker
you know, talking to people about Japanese agricultural systems. Like he, he was considered relatively fringe within Japanese agriculture, but at this farm, they were, uh, I wouldn't say devotees, but they were about that. Yeah. Yeah. They were about the Fukuoka life. I see that. I see.
00:14:52
Speaker
Yeah, and it was really kind of thrilling. One of my favorite things to relate about that experience was, you know, all these kind of smaller farms. It was exciting to be cruising through like a valley of 50, 60 acres, but just see
00:15:08
Speaker
dozens of people in all of these little fields, like, you know, engaging with nature and creating their livelihood.
Vending Machine Rice in Japan
00:15:17
Speaker
Where I was, the food was very cheap, especially for, you know, produce. Anywhere you go, it's available. And they also had this system for rice production. If you, when you're going to go buy rice, you don't even really have to go to the store. There were these periodic kind of
00:15:33
Speaker
vending stalls in these agricultural spaces. So it's just, you know, there's just all these rice fields. And then you just see this little pull off the road where there's like a vending machine and you, you know, give it some payment information and you get like a however much rice you want. It's cool, like those fields or whatever. Yeah. So it's like that production and consumption is very tightly linked in these communities.
00:15:58
Speaker
That's really cool. So I was at the National Ag Marketing Summit last year in 20, or this past year in 2023. And they had a guy there who from Texas A&M, who came to Texas A&M recently from Canada, originally from Australia. So Mr. Worldwide 2.0.
00:16:19
Speaker
The Anglosphere, well tried. Right, right. He was talking about maybe doing this project, but he had an example of this butcher shop in New South Wales where the way that they sell their product, frozen product local meat to local consumers, but you end up, you go through and you
00:16:44
Speaker
You become a customer, which requires this kind of onboarding process where you have to visit the farm, kind of, you know, CSA adjacent, but you get a key code to this keypad and you enter your keypad to get into the store. It's completely unstaffed, but it's open 24 seven. You go in, you pick up your stuff, you scan it with your phone, you put it in your bag and you, you know, you pay on your phone and you're out.
00:17:04
Speaker
And there's another interesting parallel. Tim Woods, who works with our group at the Center for Crop Diversification, hopefully he'll be joining us in the next few weeks to talk some about economic outlooks.
Comparing US and International Agriculture
00:17:17
Speaker
But he was in England for six months over the past year. And he was talking about they have a liquid milk vending machine.
00:17:32
Speaker
Interesting. Like bring your own container? Yeah, I think so. Or like maybe they have glass bottles there or something. Get a growler of milk. Yeah, get a growler. Get ready for the party. Yeah. Super Bowl Sunday, I'm bringing milk. Warm milk. Yeah. Like to wash down these nachos and wings with some full fat milk. That sounds like a party. No, but it did see, it was cool. And I think that these like intermediary technologies, it's very funny that internationally
00:17:58
Speaker
Some aspects of US agriculture are technologically and otherwise ahead and in other ways so far behind. It's pretty cool just to see that inspiration and that cross-pollination there. That sort of reminded me as far as technology used in
Unique Farming Tools in Japan
00:18:17
Speaker
production.
00:18:17
Speaker
The most popular tool over there as far as something that we don't necessarily see a lot of here in the States Of course, they all there's hand tools. There's a lot of similarity in those things. They have tractors, etc Do do they think my tractors sexy?
00:18:32
Speaker
I didn't ask. Oh, OK. Yeah, you were. Yeah, I was busy. You were figuring it out. Right. But the big popular thing over there is like so there weren't a lot of push mowers or smaller riding mowers like maintaining landscapes and all the landscapes everywhere seem to be devoted towards some kind of production. And if they're not, it's not as though they're mowed lawns or anything like that. But the big thing that I saw over there was
00:19:00
Speaker
So they use line trimmers or weed eaters, but they always get the they use the attachment where it's like a saw blade. And that is what is extensively used for kind of landscape maintenance or kind of brush cutter type. Yeah. Yeah. Like one of the things that we used to sew at the periphery of kind of the employee vegetable garden, they would do this seed mix of
00:19:23
Speaker
I couldn't tell you everything that was in it. It looked like some stuff was like millet and some grain crops or tall grasses or something like that. But something that just created a ton of biomass, like these mixes, probably some cover crop mix. And they would let that grow, you know, to some height preceding obviously like prematurity.
00:19:44
Speaker
and then would cut it back at the base while we were loading up like feed and stuff like that for the pigs to take out. We would also load up a truckload with all this biomass and take that and throw that out in there. So there was this kind of like cover cropping, cutting to like feeding the animals and stuff like that. So the space was always kind of, if it wasn't there to feed us, it was to like provide supplement for animals or some other aspects of the production system. That's very cool. That was neat.
00:20:14
Speaker
Very cool. Um, well, do you have any other, uh, final, final thoughts or any, any other things that we, you know, again, we're trying to keep these episodes a little shorter than usual.
Educational Value of Overseas Agricultural Exploration
00:20:22
Speaker
We, uh, we could obviously talk a lot more. I have a million more questions I could ask, but, uh, and if you all want to hear more about Josh's time in Japan or any other little deeper dives into any of our, uh, dark and mysterious backgrounds, uh, an episode on bear. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, do you have any, any final kind of final thoughts?
00:20:42
Speaker
Uh, just that it's cool. I would recommend if you're, if you're going to travel overseas, make sure to look into what's going on with agricultural production because it's fascinating. I mean, it's same problems, but different solutions usually. Yeah.
Conclusion and Social Media Sharing
00:20:59
Speaker
Well, thanks again for tuning in and for all the support we've gotten over the last year. It's been a really good time doing these podcasts and I think we all look forward to recording them and hearing that people have been listening. A reminder, you can check us out on Instagram at Hort Culture Pod.
00:21:15
Speaker
And if you go to, if you need to email us, or you can email all of us at hortculturepodcast at l.uky.edu. And I'll try to remember what Alexis always says, as we grow this podcast, we hope that you'll grow with us. Thanks, and we'll see you next time.