Japanese Journal of Farm Management
Online ISSN : 2186-4713
Print ISSN : 0388-8541
ISSN-L : 0388-8541
Volume 51, Issue 4
Displaying 1-4 of 4 articles from this issue
Reports
  • Mamoru SAWADA
    2014 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 8-20
    Published: March 25, 2014
    Released on J-STAGE: June 01, 2016
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This paper aims to consider the problems of the full-time farming family. I analyze recent farming family changes by using micro data from the Agriculture and Forestry census results for 2005 and 2010. For the analysis, I focus on family farms with farm products sale of more than 15 million yen. The main findings of this study are as follows:
    1) Many family farming managers were born during the so-called “baby-boom generation” between 1947 and 1950. People born after 1950 worked in industries other than agriculture due to the high economic growth after the war. As a result, the number of family farming managers is bolstered by the generation born between 1947 and 1950.
    2) It is difficult to transfer the farm business to the next generation. By 2010, everyone in the “baby-boom generation” has passed the age of 59. Many of these family farm managers have a hard time transitioning the farm business to the next generation.
    3) While the numbers of family farms decreased, the average size of the family farm has increased between 2005 and 2010. Family farms are expanding their employment.
    4) Farm management that has extended its scale tends to work on affiliated businesses such as direct marketing and farm products processing.
    These results suggest that it has become difficult to expand the scale of full-time farm family. As a measure, the role of a company corporation to compliment the family farm may become important in the future.
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  • Jaehyeon Lee
    2014 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 21-32
    Published: March 25, 2014
    Released on J-STAGE: June 01, 2016
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This paper aims to understand changes in Korean family farm structures. For that purpose, characteristics of families’ inheritance system and relations between farm householders and the local community were ascertained. How family farms procure resources and obtain farm necessary farm labor was analyzed with data from the Agricultural Census. Results of the analysis could be summarized as follows :
    First, dissimilar to the Japanese case, the family farm inheritance system does not require farm succession and there are few community restraints to farm management. Therefore, farm succession is being promoted favorably with new householders under the conditions of low barriers to entry for beginning farms. Second, the transaction mechanism preferred by family farms is not organizational hierarchy but market transactions. Regardless of farm scale, many Korean family farm operations rely on custom work and FLCs without owned farm machinery and employed workers. Third, it is hard to expect new forms of farming enterprises, such as group farming or agricultural corporations, being developed or substituting for family farms in Korea.
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  • Kazunori AWAJI
    2014 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 33-46
    Published: March 25, 2014
    Released on J-STAGE: June 01, 2016
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    In Germany, as in other countries, agriculture has been continued through family farms and the definition or recognition of “family farm” has been discussed historically. The purpose of this study is to make it clear how the family farm has been maintained and dominant in agriculture. First, the farm expansion process after World War II was examined and showed how farms have procured the resources (farm land, labor forces, machinery) for business expansion. The average size of German farms has quadrupled in the 60 years from 1950 to 2010. This enlargement has been achieved mainly by leasing farm land. Even with this expansion, most farms in Germany have not changed into “corporate farms” but kept the “family farm” organizational form, which means that the farm owner is the manager as well as the main production worker and that more than half of labor is provided by family members. This is possible through mechanization. Agriculture is a capital intensive industry and huge investments are needed. But financial analysis shows that the machinery capital has not increased so much at the farm level. Analysis revealed that farms can save investments thorugh contract farming.
    Second, the economic advantage and merit of contract farming is examined. In Germany, farm contractors and machinery rings are most developed in the world, and they form an arranging system for contract farming in regional agriculture. The system has developed the partnership between individual farms in order to outsource part of farm work. In this system, farms can save investment capital and family labor and maintain organizational flexibility. These points are the most important in this contract farming system.
    Finally, it is pointed out that the contract farming management system has formed an economic environment for maintaining “family farm” and that the management system promotes the diversifica tion of the family farm business. The contract farming management system furthers the diversification of family farms and works as a network between various individual farms for their further existence.
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  • Dairy Farms
    Kazuko SATO
    2014 Volume 51 Issue 4 Pages 47-60
    Published: March 25, 2014
    Released on J-STAGE: June 01, 2016
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The concept of family farms in the U.S., which flowed from the Jeffersonian Model, have changed over time, and now is composed of just two elements ; property farm business and management. The USDA currently defines nonfamily farms as farms owned by nonfamily corporations or cooperatives, and farms with hired managers. Otherwise, all other farms are defined as family farms. The latest concept change came about in the mid 1970’s. Since that time, farms with more than 1.5 hired workers can be considered family farms.
    Current U.S. agriculture is characterized as having a “dual structure,” which means there a small number of very large farms that dominate production and a large number of small farms with less overall production. Also, nonfamily farms were 4.1% of all farms in 2007. Middle size farms in terms of farm income (market value of agricultural products sold and government payments) exist more in grain and dairy farming when compared to other crops and animal farms.
    Dairy farms have expanding rapidly for the last one and a half decade, while milk production in the U.S. increased nearly 30%. The “Dual structure” pattern is emerging even in the dairy sector. Dairy farm size structure is different between traditional dairy states and newly established dairy states. Wisconsin is representative of traditional dairy states and California is representative of newly established dairy states. In Wisconsin small/middle farms (with less than 200 milk cows) comprised 90% of dairy farms and produced more than 50% of Wisconsin’s milk production in 2007. In California the 70% of dairy farms that have with more than 200 milk cows produced 99% of California’s milk. In California 30% of dairy farms have more than 1,000 milk cows and their share of milk production is over 70%. From statistical data about farm finance, dairy farms with around 200 milk cows hired on average 1.7 employees full time, and earned a net farm income 3 times more than the median household income of the U.S. in 2007. Dairy farms with more than 500 cows hired as many as 10 full time workers, and earned a net farm income 19 times bigger than the median household income of the U.S. in the same year. When examining the same data for California, because it reflects the farm size component, expenses for hired labor was 13.2 full time workers and net farm income was more than 25 times the median household income. Even so, their profitability is not stable.
    Dairy farms with less than 200 milking cows are still likely to fit into the family farm definition in the mid 1970’s, and this mainly remains the case in traditional dairy states. Dairy farms with more than 500 milking cows surely have a corporate character from an economic aspect. They have located in new dairy states, and are growing in traditional dairy states.
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