Rice Farming

Kubota is committed to achieving agriculture that is sustainable and environmentally friendly while ensuring production of high-quality crops and improving profitability by increasing efficiency of farm work through smart agriculture utilizing robotics and ICT.

At the heart of this smart agriculture approach is data-driven precision farming along with unmanned automated agricultural machinery and other devices to enable labor and workforce reduction. Kubota provides products and solutions that enable these and is working to promote the creation of an integrated smart agriculture system. The area where this kind of system is most advanced is rice farming.

Kubota’s main offerings in this integrated smart agricultural system are a precision farming system (Farm Management Information System, FMIS) that links data with a series of crop production processes, and unmanned automated agricultural machinery that reduces labor and workforce needs in each process.

In farming based on this integrated smart agriculture system, an FMIS that analyzes field information, work records, past cultivation data, external data and other information is used to formulate optimized planting and work plans. Based on these plans, unmanned automated agricultural machinery replicates the skills of expert farmers in each process from tilling to harvesting, reducing labor and lightening workloads. While this work is performed, the unmanned automated machinery, drones, and other devices conduct remote sensing to collect data on crop quality, yields, and other elements, and this information is utilized by FMIS to formulate planting and work plans for the following year.

Rice farming requires very careful water management in the fields. This work is complicated and labor-intensive due to staggered cropping seasons and other factors. However, a water management system linked with FMIS can be used to automatically control water from a remote location, saving labor and optimizing the process.

Rice farming is highly sensitive to the growing environment and requires meticulous care. The integrated smart agriculture system generates a cycle that formulates optimized planting and work plans based on collected data to make work more efficient while producing high-quality rice. The aim is to achieve desired yields and quality in rice farming by implementing a precise PDCA cycle while considering the impact on the environment.