抄録
Since the enactment of the “New Basic Agricultural Law,” Japan's agricultural structure has entered a new phase, beginning with the 2010 Agricultural Census. The establishment of numerous community-based group farming, spurred by the “Farming Income Stabilization Measures,” led to a rapid increase in organized management entities in the agricultural census. This has accelerated the consolidation of paddy fields by large-scale agricultural management entities. This trend was particularly pronounced in the Tohoku and Northern Kyushu regions and at the prefectural level in Saga Prefecture. Since 2015, the pace of farmland concentration by organized management entities has slowed, but the number of regions in which large-scale farmers are making great strides as recipients of farmland has increased. It became clear that farmland concentration toward large-scale agricultural management entities progressed more in areas with higher rates of decline in the number of commercial farm households, and that consolidation accelerated in areas with higher levels of farmland concentration. In recent years, there has been a tendency for regions to be divided into those where farmland is concentrated among large-scale agricultural management entities and those where there are no farmers, and the farmland area has rapidly decreased. Northern Kyushu falls into the former category, but the 2020 Agricultural Census also shows signs of the stagnating liquidity of paddy fields.
