Our Challenges
“More Easily, More Efficiently”—Approaching Anxious Farmers with High-performance Agricultural Machinery
To make farming work easier and more productive, since the sale of its cultivator in 1947, Kubota had been working to introduce agricultural machinery and in turn contribute to the modernization and development of agriculture in Japan, and ensure stable food supplies. In 1970, when rice transplanting was still being done manually and needs for mechanization were growing, Kubota succeeded in the mass production of rice transplanters. Approximately ten times more efficient than manual transplanting work, these machines freed farmers from worries related to worker shortages and heavy labor.
In the 1990s, there was growing demand for highly efficient ride-on machinery that could enable easy rice transplanting. Kubota responded with the development of a revolutionary function—a rotary-type planting claw that could plant two seedlings in one rotation (previous machines could only plant one). This function opened up the way for high-speed planting. And so, in 1991, Kubota released the S1 transplanter complete with the Miracle Rotary function. This machine was a precise response to farmers’ needs for ride-on machinery that facilitated easy, quick planting. Although the rice transplanting work itself had been made more efficient, farmers struggled to cross the ridges between rice fields. To cater to this new requirement, in 1998 Kubota developed the Ridge-crossing Arm, which enabled farmers to cross ridges and load and unload the machine onto their trucks with ease and peace of mind.
In 1997, Kubota released its revolutionary Power Crawler series of tractors. At the time, tractors with rubber crawlers that boasted excellent driving performance on wet paddies were garnering attention. Although Kubota understood the necessity of such machines, it only wanted to develop its own if it could ensure a lightweight and compact design, while it was also concerned that the crawlers would dig into and damage fields when turning. The company thus designed a tractor with wheels at the front and crawlers at the rear, an arrangement that featured the best of both worlds. The new series caused a stir among farmers who wanted to be able to easily and quickly till and prepare their rice fields. Even today, the Power Crawler series continues to evolve and see widespread support from the farming population.
Japan was entering an era in which aging farming populations and worker shortages were becoming real issues. Agriculture was beginning to change, and approaching the industry with high-performance, high-value-added machinery was no longer enough.
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