Recently, a community-based farming corporation has started to introduce tourism into its management. However, the corporation isn’t dealing with it in a determined way due to lack of a precedent and knowledge about an attitude of travel agent’s employees. The purpose of this study is to clarify the travel agent’s evaluation of agriculture and a rural area and its related issues, from the standpoint of providing the corporation with a guideline.

Through the analysis of the attitude of travel agent’s employees in charge of travel planning, I got the knowledge about their evaluation below. 1) Activity to be incorporated into agritourism, 2) Handling of agritourism, 3) Activity of a rural area and its vicinity and 4) Agritourism in the Tohoku region. In addition, it is clarified that considerable number of the respondents hope to utilize the activity that develops deeper understanding of a rural area and that, at the same time, the respondents who hope to do so have some tendencies on travel planning like trying to allocate more time for visiting a rural area.

The corporation will be able to achieve its development through activities related to tourism by making the most of the findings of this research, such as the fact that travel agents expect the Tohoku region’s strength as tourism destination to more than make up for its drawback as far as its geographical location and natural environment are concerned.

Under the free trade system, global agriculture and agricultural product trade dominated by multinational agribusinesses became strong. In this situation, various problems occurred in United States of America, such as an increase of the environmental load by agriculture, the lowering of food safety because of the separation between production and consumption and the weakening of rural communities caused by the increased size of agricultural farms. The purpose of this research was to examine the actual situation of the relationship between the consumers in the communities and the small-scale farms which are expected as an alternative to the agriculture dominated by multinational agribusinesses in Massachusetts, North-East U.S.A. We conducted a case study on the Food Project (FP), a non-profit organization, operating five agricultural farms in and around Boston. FP supplies agricultural products to charity organizations, CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) for low income people, is modestly priced. It also operates farmers’ markets in areas where mainly the poor live and carries out the dissemination activities of home gardens. In addition to that, it is engaged in fostering young leaders for the next generation and educating the youth through work and learning activities in farms. In the research from the perspective of the subsumption of agriculture to capital led by multinational agribusinesses and that of structuring the counterweight against it, an approach that focuses mainly on non-profit organization should also be included in the subjects of research.

The innovation of the orchard system is essential to improve the yield and quality of fruits. Now in apple production, there are various problems, such as labor shortage, the decreasing of apple production and so on. The adoption of new apple orchard systems is hoped as solutions for these problems. But these new systems often require equipment to support apple trees. And also, they often require a lot of labor for forming the shapes of trees from the first year. Therefore, in order for the systems to prevail it is important to clarify the essential inputs of materials, labor force and money which their adoption entails. The aim of this paper is, by comparing the new systems with the present ones, to clarify the features of the initial costs, costs of growing apple trees and labor inputs of the first year of the adoption. The analysis is based on the data of the examination at the experimental farm of Tsugaru Hirosaki agricultural cooperative. The results of the research are following: the tall spindle system and the tree joint training system costs three to five times larger amount of money than the present systems in order to plant young trees, install equipment to support them and to manage their growth in the first year. At the same time, the adoption of these systems requires apple growers to input more labor into growing and strengthening trees when they operate apple thinning which is the busiest period. Judging from these, the area where apple growers could adopt these systems in one year is limited. Therefore, it assumed to take a long term to innovate a whole orchard by introducing these systems.

Although many of the existing studies on wildlife problems aim at how to alleviate damage to human beings by wildlife, residents in agricultural area tend to allow the existence of wildlife. In recent years wildlife problems are becoming manifest in non-agricultural areas such as cities and suburbs, so it is important to clarify what kind of consciousness the residents in non-agricultural areas have on wildlife problems. This is because residents in non-agricultural areas may reconsider not only how to relate to wildlife but also how to relate to nature and agricultural areas by seeing the wildlife problems as opportunities. In this research, we aim to clarify the residents' conscious structure on wildlife problem in non-agricultural areas. As a viewpoint to grasp the relationship between human and wildlife, we adopt the concept of "symbiosis". This is because by using this concept we can understand the phenomenon that residents tend to permit wildlife to live in their living environment (so the wildlife become symbiotic) because the wildlife is 'load' for them. Analysis models incorporating the concepts of "load" "symbiosis" was constructed. To verify these analysis models, a questionnaire survey was conducted to ask residents in the suburbs of Sendai City how they think about wildlife problems. As a result, the following tendencies are clarified: 1. people who have witnessed wildlife tend to permit wildlife to live in their living environment; 2. people who have tolerant attitude toward wildlife tend to evaluate habitat management for wildlife as a measure against wildlife. The latter tendency can be interpreted that habitat management for wildlife is symbiotic measure, so people who can permit wildlife to live in their living environment tend to prefer this measure.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of farmer’s restaurants as a means of reviving rural areas. Using the case of farmer’s restaurants in Yamagata, their role in terms of rebirth of the areas will be examined based on the types of menus and size of their business. The reasons for choosing farmer’s restaurants in Yamagata prefectures is because they are attempting to revive the rural areas through their own food culture and whole prefecture is making effort to revive the community. For descriptive purpose, the role of the traditional foods and non-traditional foods was examined separately. Both foods play an important role in conveying the necessity and importance of agriculture, rural areas and foods through their local products. In addition, the distinctiveness of the rural areas attracts and draws urban people to the community, which will result in intercommunication between local and urban people. Moreover, running farmer’s restaurant for people in Yamagata can closely link to their self-fulfillment and meaningful life. The result indicates that one of the significant role of the traditional foods is dissemination of their food culture, dietary education and utilization of regional resources, on the other hand, non-traditional foods have a huge effects on generating economic value, such as increasing income and creating a new market in the local area.

Many food business operators have developed various products based on the idea that good products will be naturally recognized and that sales will grow. Marketing capabilities have become particularly important for growth because of food business operators’ inadequacies in terms of product development capacity compared to large companies. Earlier studies have not specifically examined the new customer acquisition through marketing activities.

This study verified that new customer development through marketing activities is important for food business operator growth. At the same time, this study specifically examined business fairs, which are one means of customer development, reviewed the methods of carrying out business fairs, reviewed and evaluated the track records of business fairs, and examined issues discovered through evaluation.

At a business fair held in Niigata in January 2016, 12.2% of business operators found new customers, which demonstrates that business fairs are an effective means of finding new customers among the many customer development methods. The study also revealed that food business operators did not carry out marketing activities to target those buyers who intended to continue negotiations after the business fair.

Food business operators aiming to grow through new customer development will likely increase the possibility of finding new customers rather than waiting for buyers to come after developing a new product, carrying out sales activities voluntarily for buyers who are interested in their product at a business fair or other occasions and improving their sales capabilities to be able to adapt to customers by adjusting product specifications for buyers to develop business ties.

While the broiler industry in China has experienced tremendous growth，at the same time the pollution problems and food safety issues have emerged. This paper aims to clarify the correspondence of livestock farmers during the progress of integration，while at the same time considering the background of broiler industry．Survey results indicate that，the majority of livestock farmers are incorporated into contracts integrating with broiler processing companies directly or through a broker．Also，the trends of livestock farmers vary by farm size．Small-scale farmers rely on brokers to procure funds for things such as poultry houses，supply materials for production，technical support，and selling broilers，but due to the environmental regulations，they will go out of business if they are exposed．Large-scale farmers independently choose the production contracts with processing companies，and are planning further expansion of management in the future．Some mid-sized farmers rely on brokers，or others who contract with processing companies independently, and as a management trend in the future，they are standing at a branching road of having to choose between increasing the scale or maintaining the current state．As the number of small-scale farmers will decline in the future，structural reorganization will proceed in a way that the number of feeder fish becomes more concentrated in large-scale poultry management．

The objective of this research is to verify how the full-time diversified farm household in Tsugaru region adjusted upland products toward direct marketing at farmers market, and how farmers participation in farmers market can change their farm management. Farmers market K and full-time diversified farmer A in Tsugaru city are examined as a case study. This study exposed; 1) farmers markets’ various supports to assemble local farm products encouraged full time farmers who had experience growing vegetables with JA collective marketing to change their outlets into farmers market. 2) Sluggish market price, high cost burden of collective marketing also affected to farmers decision; shifting outlet. Farmers market helped farmers to control selling price and timing with relatively low cost. 3)while the new outlet helped the farmer save marketing cost and bring higher income, family labor shortage came to the surface. To address this new challenge, production on paddy was reduced; besides proportion of rice forage out of total paddy production was increasing. Entering farmers market cause restructuring of production both of upland crop and paddy. This paper concluded that development of farmers market may change the structure of local agricultural production.

Recently, decreasing of farmers in rural community has made agricultural resource conservation difficult. It is required to reform resource conservation organizations across regions and to make nonfarmers participate in that organizations. This paper aims to clarify effect and issues of reorganization of agricultural resource conservation organization into wide area, through a case study on non-profit organization in Yokote-city, Akita.

The results are as follows. Firstly, reform into wide area improved resource conservation activities due to secure labor and funds. Secondly, that enhanced community activities and provided for non-farmers participation for agricultural resource conservation. Thirdly, it is necessary to bring up a successor with the leadership and the understanding of resource conservation.