OREANDA-NEWS. August 24, 2012. Fujitsu announced that, in collaboration with the Federation of Hokkaido Agricultural Mutual Aid Association (Hokkaido NOSAI) and the Kamikawa Chuo Agricultural Mutual Aid Association (Kamikawa Chuo NOSAI), it will aid in creating maps of rice paddy parcels using proprietary Fujitsu image analysis technology. The technology will utilize satellite images and aerial photographs to recognize the boundaries between rice paddies and the embankments that separate them. From August 9 to October 31, Fujitsu will be conducting a field test to evaluate the technology's usefulness in confirming the crop area of new members when they join NOSAI, as well as other applications.

Background

Since agriculture depends heavily on natural conditions, Japan's agricultural mutual aid system(1) helps provide relief to farmers by compensating them based on the area of the land and the type of crops they are cultivating when fields are damaged by typhoons, severe rainfall or other natural disasters. In order to operate, each year federations of agricultural mutual aid associations throughout Japan (NOSAI) are required to quickly identify newly added farmland and crop rotations by working with member farms and affiliated organizations to check each of a vast number of rice paddies and manually update rice paddy parcel maps. This is usually performed based on farmer-submitted crop change reports that provide information about farmland that has been converted from rice paddies to another kind of crop, and vice versa. At the same time, due to Japan's aging farmer population and a lack of new farmers, these activities represent a substantial workload for member farmers, while also presenting a significant burden to NOSAI, in terms of both labor and cost. To preserve Japan's agricultural mutual aid system, streamlining the process of updating agricultural parcel maps is a significant priority, and NOSAI is actively engaged in efforts to improve agricultural parcel mapping through the use of Geographic Information System technology.