抄録
There are various opinions about future vision of part-time farming with steady and sufficient off-farm income. In this paper, I focus this subject on the viewpoint of land use, especially village level land use, for the purpose of proper rural planning.
Some writers proposed the visions that part-time farming with steaedy and sufficient off-farm income is to be a sort of transitional existence and the farming scale of it would finally become small to use only some hundred square meters for vegetable growing within the limit of self-support use.
On the other hand, some another writers proposed the visions that part-time farming with steady and sufficient off-farm income in Japan is seemed to have some different dispositions, when it is compared with that in Europe, and parttime farmer would insist in keeping more than some thousands square meters, and furthermore the crops are not only vegetables for self-support use but also rice.
It is pointed that the reason why part-time farmer consist on growing rice is that they desire to keep their membership as farmers in village society, and in that case, the scale of rice farming is seemed to be one of the symbol of membership as farmers.
It must be noted that there is another reason that in Japan, traditionally, there is no distinction between kitchen garden and farm land, so, the changing of farmers' mind from farming mannagement to hobby dose not clearly mean stopping the use of farm land, and only keeping kitchen garden.
Accordingly. it is important to consider such sociological and historical-cultural viewpoint, and it is to be hoped that future vision of part-time farming would be studyed not only from the economics approach but also sociological approach.
