Rice, a staple food that we eat every day, is produced all over the world. There are three main subspecies of cultivated rice – Japonica, Indica, and Javanica – and these include more than 100,000 different varieties.
Rice farming is a form of agriculture that requires meticulous management, from water and pest control to fertilizing. For farmers with little rice farming experience to continuously produce high-quality rice, the key is visualized farming that leverages digital technologies such as IoT and AI along with data including growth conditions.
Kubota, a proponent of smart agriculture, offers the Kubota Smart Agri System (KSAS), a precision farming system (Farm Management Information System, FMIS) that enables data-driven agriculture, to farmers in Japan. Through the optimization of data-based farming work, it provides a foundation for stable production of high-quality rice.
The Complexity of Rice Farming
Rice is a major cereal grain that is consumed all over the world, including Japan and Southeast Asia. However, rice farming is a delicate process that is greatly affected by changes in the rice’s growing environment, from water temperature and nutrients to air temperature and sunlight.
Since long ago, Japanese rice farmers have used precise and meticulous methods, such as planting seedlings in straight lines and with even spacing. This kind of uniform planting ensures that seedlings are not wasted and are exposed to sunlight and wind evenly, giving farmers greater stability in growth and quality.
Planting rice evenly and controlling water temperature in accordance with weather conditions that change each day require farmers to have expert skill and intuition backed by years of experience. On top of this, rice can only be harvested once per year, so failure is not an option.
To make rice farming that requires precision work and management sustainable amid the decline in the agricultural workforce, there needs to be a solution that allows anyone to produce high-quality rice. Japan is grappling with a super aging society and a decreasing number of professional farmers, so efforts have been made to solve these issues as a country that has been among the first to face such agricultural challenges. However, similar issues are starting to arise or have already arisen in other countries, and the situation is becoming serious. What will be crucial is to establish a system that enables precision PDCA-model agriculture that allows anyone to produce high-quality crops regardless of their level of rice farming experience.
Precision Farming in Smart Agriculture and Kubota’s Approach
Agriculture today faces a number of challenges, including labor shortages caused by a declining population, the aging of farmers, and increasing burden on the environment. With this in mind, smart agriculture that utilizes advanced technologies such as robots, ICT, and AI is anticipated to be a solution that can realize sustainable agriculture.
Along with automated and unmanned agricultural machinery, one of the core elements of smart agriculture is precision farming based on data. This collects and analyzes data in each process of agricultural work to enable farming that produces high-quality crops without relying on expert intuition or experience, and it lowers environmental burden through optimized use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Kubota is focusing on automation and labor reduction in agriculture as well as the use of data to enable precision work and reduce environmental impact. At the heart of this approach is KSAS, the Farm Management Information System (FMIS).
KSAS is at the Heart of Data-Driven Agriculture
KSAS is a cloud-based farm management information system that is designed to provide data-driven precision farming. The system can store and manage data related to farm management, such as work records of cultivated fields and crops produced. And by linking it with Kubota’s communications-enabled agricultural machinery, taste, yield, and other crop information can be assessed and variable fertilization can be performed on cultivated fields with uneven growth, helping to improve quality and yield.
For a specific example, farmers can harvest crops with a combine harvester equipped with sensors capable of measuring taste and yield, offering a visual representation of those results for each cultivated field on KSAS. This helps them determine at a glance if yield is high or low, or if quality is good or bad. Typically, farmers had to rely on their experience and intuition to see how their fields were doing, but with KSAS and connected combine harvesters, they can instead take advantage of data-based agriculture. This means that even workers without much experience can operate farms.
Utilizing KSAS can also help with variable fertilizer application, which is adjusted according to crop growth conditions. This method not only allows for optimal application of fertilizer, but also optimizes fertilizer amounts to reduce excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This can enable more sustainable farming with less environmental impact.
Here is one Kubota customer who is taking advantage of variable fertilization. Niigata Yuuki Co, Ltd. in Niigata Prefecture is using variable fertilization to stabilize soil fertility in response to the changes in the cultivated field’s soil quality caused by flood damage two years ago. They generated a variable fertilization map based on satellite sensing data and carried out the work using transplanters and drones. As a result, they have reduced fertilizer use by about 10% from last year and increased overall revenue by about 8%, improving both operational and environmental performance.
KSAS is a system that Kubota has developed over many years with the help of numerous farmers. It is being used by 28,000 farmers as of June 2024, earning high praise for its help with “more efficient cultivated field management,” “higher yields,” and “better quality.” Kubota continues to advance KSAS and is accelerating its efforts to realize profitable farm management through data-driven precision farming.
Going Beyond Rice for Solutions to All Agricultural Challenges
As agriculture becomes more complex and is affected by various environmental changes, Kubota will aim to realize farming methods in which anyone can produce high-quality crops through precise data-based management for many kinds of crops, not just rice.
To further advance this data-driven agriculture, Kubota will promote the use of its precision farming system as an open platform and enable links with external data where necessary. Sensor data from other manufacturer’s machinery as well as Kubota’s along with big data can be collected and analyzed to propose optimized farm operational and business plans that take into account the entire food value chain, from production to consumption.
This approach will enable precise PDCA-style farm management that can provide a stable supply of just the right volume of crops according to needs, and it can also contribute to reducing food loss. Kubota hopes to make sustainable farming possible and improve the appeal of agriculture as a business through its efforts.
