Crowdfunding in the Japanese Agricultural Sector

Abstract

In recent years, crowdfunding has attracted attention as a mechanism of financing new projects. Research has been conducted into the factors behind the success of crowdfunding, but there has been little research into crowdfunding in the agricultural sector. Therefore, here, we analyzed the status of use, and factors behind the success, of crowdfunding in agriculture, and we considered its future potential use in this field. We found that 66.7% of all respondents considered that crowdfunding had benefits not found in conventional funding, such as increased advertising effectiveness and more fans. We also found that the success factors were a low target amount, a large number of supporters, existence of options on giving larger contributions, and a large number of activity reports. However, the number of reward types, which was regarded as a success factor in previous research on non-agricultural crowdfunding, was not a success factor in agricultural projects. We found that e-mail was not a suitable dissemination tool for crowdfunding projects in agriculture. Furthermore, we found that social networking services such as Twitter and Instagram were not often used in agricultural crowdfunding. Also, people who succeeded in their projects—but not those who failed—greatly appreciated the use of crowdfunding in agriculture. Nevertheless, we found that not many people—including those who were successful—were planning to use crowdfunding again in the future.