Journal of Rural Problems

One of the most outstanding features of recent Japanese agriculture is that so many women are launching careers in farm management as independent farm managers. In spite of the rapid increase in the number of female farm managers, most studies on Japanese agriculture deal only with farms run by male managers.
This paper will thus investigate the nature of farming managed by women. There are two objectives in this paper. One is to highlight women's farming philosophies. The other is to examine the influence of women's philosophy on their family and rural society.
In order to consider the farming philosophy characteristic to female managers, a unique marketing system organized by farmers in Shiga prefecture in Japan will be highlighted in this paper. In addition, Inamoto's four categories of farming philosophy will be introduced as a conceptual device to deal with female farm management.
According to the result of analysis, farm management by women can broadly be classified into four types. In two of the categories, female managers run their farm independently without any influence from their husband. This fact leads to an insight, as discussed in the paper, that women's farming philosophy consists of adequate hospitality and the ideas which enrich their daily lives.

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In this paper, we quantitatively analyzed decision making regarding rental land (zhuanbao), which is the land to which the right of contract of farmland is transferred, and what extent rental land influences productivity, using the MHTS panel dataset which the Research Center of Rural Economy, China created through investigations of the Rural China Fixed Point Observation survey.
In this paper, we make clear the following points. Firstly, we analyzed decision making regarding rental land. As a result, we make clear that tenure types of potential labor in household, performance of farm management and working types to other industries influence decision making regarding land mobilization. Secondly, we analyzed to what extent land mobilization influences productivity with production function, with dummy variable of rental land and rate of rental land. As a result, we make clear that there is no clear improvement of TFP, even if households rent land; on the other hand, the TFP has tended to drop since the end of the 90s. With factor decomposition, which makes use of the result of the above-mentioned estimations, we confirmed these tendencies and make clear that improvement of productivity through rental land is very small.

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Increasing interest in agricultural environmental issues seems to be leading to the decline of concern for agricultural productivity. Parting from the pursuit of agricultural productivity is regarded as an essential of transition to a sustainable farming system (SFS) among some of journalists and even the researchers in the field of agricultural economics.
This paper critically examines this view. The main conclusions are as follows. The agricultural policy since the Agricultural Basic Law (1961) has paid special attention to the labor saving-biased efficiency standard, in response to labor shortage in agriculture, whereas it neglected the improvement in overall productivity of industrial input and natural resources. The labor saving-biased farming system, featuring the substitution of fuel energy and agricultural chemicals for farm labor, has caused a decline in economic efficiency of agricultural industry, not to mention a rise in environmental deterioration. The transition to a SFS therefore calls for improved and efficient use of industrial input and natural resources, or agricultural productivity. To simultaneously achieve economic and environmental benefits from farming activities, it is necessary to shift away from the labor saving-biased efficiency standard to total factor productivity.

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