Grundy County farmers learn about agriculture in Japan

A pair of local farmers took a trip to Japan in July to learn about agricultural practices in the Asian nation and get a taste of some of the crops grown there. Grundy County Farm Bureau President Brian Feldpausch of Beaman and State Farm Bureau Board of Directors member Mark Buskohl of Grundy Center travelled with their wives and shared their experiences upon returning to Grundy County.
           
Buskohl and Feldpausch spent just over a week in the Yamanishi region in central Japan, a landlocked prefecture (the Japanese version of a U.S. state) that is the sister state to Iowa. The percentage of Japanese people working in agriculture has rapidly declined since the end of World War II, and just 13 percent of the country’s approximately 146,000 square miles are farmed.
 
There are still plenty of small farmers making a living on plots as small as a few acres, however. Rice is the most well-known and widely grown crop in the country, but the Japanese also grow a variety of fruits and vegetables, such as eggplant, peaches and grapes, along with raising livestock.
 
“I was surprised by the diversity. I was thinking a lot of rice, and I knew they grew pork and a lot of hogs over there,” Feldpausch said. “But the amount of fruit and vegetables, especially the fruit produced and the quality of it, was what surprised me.”
 
Read more in this week's Grundy Register.