Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) will this month begin large-scale testing of a new cloud-based agricultural IT management tool (“Housaku Keikaku”) through the Rice Growers Improvement Network* in the Aichi and Ishikawa prefectures of Japan.
The testing is part of a project, also to begin this month, run by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) to create and test advanced agricultural management models.
Recently in Japan, increasing numbers of small-scale farmers and landowners have been entrusting land cultivation to large-scale agricultural cooperatives. To address the needs of this growing farming model and make it more efficient, Toyota developed the IT tool as a means to organize data gathered from independent field laborers into a central database so that work on scattered, independent rice farms can be better managed.
The tool generates and distributes daily coordinated work plans to multiple laborers at different rice fields over a large area. As laborers report their progress via smartphone or tablet to a central database, administrators can manage the overall cultivation.
