This study examines the importance of agricultural organization management entities that have permanently hired workers who own or rent paddy fields, in consideration of regional characteristics. The results indicate that the majority of agricultural organization management entities having permanently hired workers are corporations, and the paddy field share of such corporations is high from the Hokuriku region to the Sanyo region in Japan. However, in 2020, the number of agricultural organization management entities with permanently hired workers decreased. At the same time, paddy field accumulation by such entities also slowed down, contributing to the increase in the overall rate of decline of paddy fields.

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This study analyzed trends of changes in agricultural labor force and farm succession between 2015 and 2020 using the 2020 Census of Agriculture and Forestry data. The results of the analysis revealed the following points. The first one is the stagnation of farm succession. The decrease in the number of farm managers follows the same trend as that in the past. In particular, the 2020 Census data showed a decline in the number of farm household members engaged in agriculture. The second point is that the share of agricultural corporations in domestic agriculture is increasing. In farms having small and medium-sized livestock such as pigs and chickens, agricultural corporations account for the majority of livestock production. The third point is that there is an increase in the number of employees in some farms and agricultural corporations: the number of employees in farms declined significantly from 2015 to 2020. However, some farms and agricultural corporations have increased the number of employees and expanded the scale of operation. The fourth point is the rapid aging of managers of agricultural corporations. More than 30% of agricultural corporations have not been able to secure successors. These results indicate that succession measures are an urgent issue for not only farmers but also agricultural corporations.

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The purpose of this study is to clarify recent trends in large-scale rice farming, particularly community-based group farming, using data in the 2020 Census of Agriculture and Forestry. The number of agricultural organization management entities has continued to increase over the years, and these management entities have been expected to play a central role in regional agriculture. However, the 2020 Census of Agriculture and Forestry revealed that the number of such management entities has plateaued, and the number of large-scale individual entities has increased significantly. In other words, the trend has changed. Most of the agricultural organization management entities for rice farming are community-based group farming entities. Therefore, in this study, we analyzed community-based group farming and found that although the number of incorporated management organizations has increased, such organizations have not been engaged in new business such as vegetable production or farm product processing business. In addition, there is an urgent need to secure successors to take over the work of aging managers. It is necessary to develop management through collaborations among multiple organizations and with different industries.

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In this study，Yugan County，Jiangxi Province，which is located in a double-cropping rice planting area in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River was used as the study area．Differences in management and choice of rice transplanting techniques in a natural village with an outflow of agricultural laborers were explored in this study．The findings showed that small farmers adopted manual transplanting methods for effective agricultural operations in the absence of convention mechanical rice transplanting methods，whereas large-scale upper farmers utilized labor-saving methods such as throwing of seedlings for transplanting. This variation in the transplanting methods used by farmers explain the differences in management methods．

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Agency development of small farmers is a dynamic process of extensive multilevel cooperation and intensive interweaving of various actors. This paper examines farmers’ autonomous response to the socio-economic conditions and the supportive roles of various actors, based on a series of case studies of Madagascar rice farming. First, commercialization and marketing behaviors are categorically illustrated according to the farm structures. Second, the factors of participation in SRI（System of Rice Intensification）training and its impacts are examined. Third, the development process of AKIS（Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System）towards fair-trade is traced and the roles of international and local actors for its formation are clarified. Fourth, a farmer trainer approach of JICA（Japan International Cooperation Agency）project is exemplified as a trial for autonomous and sustainable farmer-to-farmer technology extension.

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