This past week I’ve been attending an International Federation of Agricultural Journalists Congress in Japan. On one of our stops we saw precision agriculture on display in a rice paddy! This is in development now at the Furukawa Agricultural Research Station.

I interviewed Yoshisada Nogasaka, Research Team for Farm Machinery and Systems for NARC, the National Agricultural Research Center. He’s the guy who’s developing the software to run the prototype Autonomous Rice Transplanter we saw on demonstration at the Furukawa Agricultural Research Center. This guy is enthusiastic to say the least. He says that when he demonstrates this thing on a farm the farmer asks, “Can you leave it here on my farm?” They’re really looking forward to it but they’ll have some waiting to do. He says it could be up to 10 years before commercial production.

You can listen to his remarks here: Yoshisada Nagasaka Interview (2:00 min mp3)

I also produced a short video clip of the unit in action.