Office Rice Paddy Turns Tokyo Salarymen into Urban Farmers

By Clay Dillow Posted 10.25.2010 at 2:51 pm 13 Comments

Harvesting Rice in an Office Tower BBC

Office workers in Japan are adding some rural relaxation, if you can call it that, to their usual workaday routines. In Tokyo’s bustling business hub of Otemachi, a 1,000-square-foot indoor rice paddy is providing office workers a way to get back to their horticultural roots – and 100 pounds of rice for the building’s cafeteria. That’s actually kind of a big deal for a country that grows only half of the food it requires.

The rice paddy is an experimental effort to get city-dwellers more interested in farming, but also to provide office workers with a rural respite from their crowded urban environs. It also aims to teach skills that have been lost even in Japan’s countryside, where many agricultural tasks have been taken over by machinery.

The implications for future food production are vast as well: Since the paddy is indoors and immune to seasons, it can produce a harvest three times yearly. The 110 pounds this particular paddy produced in its first harvest doesn’t even cover a single Japanese person’s annual rice consumption. But it’s not hard to envision a system where office buildings and apartment towers incorporate larger-scale versions of this indoor farming scheme to produce larger quantities of rice to supplement the harvest from the countryside.

The Otemachi rice paddy is maintained by eight professional farmers, but the harvest was carried out by salaried office drones from a personnel outsourcing firm in the building. Ostensibly, the office workers get to blow off some steam away from their computers, the farmers get a little help harvesting their crops, and everyone gets a little bit of rice in his or her bowl. Not bad considering they didn’t even have to go outside.

[BBC, City Farmer]

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13 Comments

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Yaz

10/25/10 at 3:39 pm

It takes 8 professional farmers to maintain a 1000 sq foot rice paddy? And that does not even include the harvesting. No wonder they have food production problems.

I assume there is some fact that I'm missing, such as:
-The 8 Farmers work part time and trade off
-The 8 Farmers are volunteers and trade off
-The 8 Farmers are Americans on a rehabilitation program
-There is actually only 1 farmer, but he comes in 8 times a month.
-The 8 Farmers are actually re-employed as janitors and they also take care of the rest of the building
-There is no punchline to this list, but feel free to add one.

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kidkaboom22

10/25/10 at 5:03 pm

Well if the farm idea ever fails aleast they can recycle that mud pit into a wrestling mud pit for hot japanese girls.:p

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Fedaykin

10/25/10 at 5:15 pm

Yaz's comment just simply can't be topped. I was going to try, but I yeild to the Master.

That was funny.

Cheers!

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Dirk Mcbratney

10/25/10 at 8:26 pm

Yes. = ) an interesting and amusing article, but a brilliant comment.

And I'm going to have the closing music from Seven Samurai stuck in my head for days.

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inaka_rob

10/25/10 at 9:53 pm

@Yaz: yeah. I am not sure about that. I live in Japan. I am also have rice paddys on two sides of my apartment not to mention all around my city. (the Japanese rice you eat in the USA was developed in my prefecture: koshihikari rice) The largest number of people I have ever seen work on a rice paddy is 3. Usually it is just 2. Often just 1. Most farmers around here are just a man and his wife. Maybe their son will help. The man does most of the work. Sometimes I will see his wife tend the field once the rice is planted and growing.
The family next to me owns a numbers of paddys. I think only 2 or 3 members of the family have anything to do with rice production though. The rest of the members are too young or too old to work (4 generation household!!!) or busy raising children. Maybe some people send their rice off too a bigger distributor, that could increase the average number of people involved in the rice, but many just keep the rice for their family for the year, or sell locally.

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futurewiz14526

10/25/10 at 9:54 pm

cheapos.

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BuzzLightYear

10/26/10 at 4:29 am

They should add an old-style (bare-foot) wine-press . . .

The Cafeteria Menu might read:

KOBE "Toe-Jam" Rice Cakes, with "Foot-Funk" Chablis
(please specify Dr. Shoals or Aftate)

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holterbarbour

10/26/10 at 9:39 am

Rice is harvested from a dry paddy. These guys are planting rice, not harvesting it.

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jexaon

10/28/10 at 12:37 pm

yeah a mudwrestling pit for hot japanese girls with big tits sounds nice!!!

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izmitli

10/29/10 at 11:09 pm

Chat

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cecilio

10/30/10 at 1:08 am

That is serious. Since we are born into this world without particular thing to do we may just as well live right. Produce our own food, don't pollute, don't commit crime, don't eat animals, have sex but control population, discard religion, recycle, study and be creative. We can have buildings/homes that are self sufficient and self-contained. Hence, to go outside, to study outside, to work or to depend on government will just be optional. The logic is, if the earth can be self-sufficient/self-contained,why can't a small part of it? It's only outsource is the sun.

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