UESUGI Shiro    Department   Matsuyama University  Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Business Administration    Position   Professor
Language	English
Publication Date	2013/12
Type
Title	The Use of IT in Rural Amateur Agriculture - A case from rural Japan -.
Contribution Type
Journal	Proc. of the 6th JPAIS/JASMIN International Meeting 2013
Publisher	JPAIS/JASMIN
Volume, Issue, Pages	pp.39-48
Details	As the broadband services have been penetrating into rural areas of Japan, attentions are given more to emerging services that promotes innovations related to agricultural industry. For example, a service called “Smart Gardener®” that utilizes internet to oversee the conditions of products and control farming devices remotely has been used since 2012. In Ehime, which is a rural area, a service which let the users grow vegetables in cyber paddocks where their actions are actually reflected to the real paddocks is developed. When the player successfully crops the products in the game, they actually get the vegetables. These are professional agricultural production activities. In this study, however, a case from amateur’s point of view is provided. Growing vegetables have been recognized as one of the major weekend fun activities for more than 200 years in Germany. Dedicated facility is called “Kleingarten”. This case study presents a case study of introducing IT into a Kleingarten in Japanese rural area. The goal of this study is to share the findings up to this day. Furthermore, through the observations and trials, it looks into what IT enabled services are necessary in amateur agriculture activities.