Even with the arrival of the 2025 harvest, rice prices are likely to remain high. While the rise in rice prices became apparent in 2024, it had actually been gradually emerging since around 2019. The summer harvest of new rice, known as early-season rice, has become a staple in supermarkets as a seasonal ingredient. Early-season rice is harvested earlier than rice in major producing areas such as Niigata Prefecture and Hokkaido. Retail prices for the 2019 harvest of new rice generally began at a high price. The price increase stemmed from agricultural cooperatives raising the purchase price from farmers. This was in response to farmers’ dissatisfaction with not earning a proper income from rice. However, sellers who regularly interact with consumers, such as supermarkets, reduced their purchases of early-season rice. The reality is that bread consumption exceeds rice consumption by 30%. Stores that interact with customers on a daily basis purchase products while closely monitoring consumer trends. In this sense, rice has lagged behind.
The agricultural population will continue to decline. One solution is to develop agricultural tools using AI and robots. Japanese companies are also doing this. Panasonic is developing a tomato-harvesting robot. This robot moves back and forth on rails between tomato rows, collecting images with a camera. Once it recognizes a tomato, it further examines its color and shape to determine whether it is ready to be harvested. Furthermore, in addition to learning to recognize tomatoes, it also repeatedly learns to recognize tomatoes in hard-to-see locations. Once it determines that the tomatoes are ready for harvest, it harvests them. The robot harvests the tomatoes using two arms while being towed by an autonomous vehicle. The development of such a machine is one option.
Overseas, systems are not only being developed to automatically grow and harvest crops, but also incorporating mechanisms to solve modern challenges. In 2017, Harvey Adams University (UK) successfully automated agricultural work. They succeeded in sowing, tending, and harvesting using only self-driving cars and drones. Barley was sowed, tended, and harvested automatically on a 6,000 square meter farm. The self-propelled robot used for this was able to perform up to 2 hectares of work automatically in 10 hours. Solar panels and batteries were installed on this self-propelled robot. It was an amazing achievement that the electricity needed to operate the self-propelled robot was generated by solar power. It seems that agricultural work with as little human labor as possible is just around the corner. If this method were introduced to rice cultivation, it may be possible to achieve fair prices that are desirable for both farmers and consumers.
