COURTESY OF NTT AGRITECHNOLOGY
Cutting Down on Labor Needs in Agricultural Work
Japan’s agricultural landscape is at a crossroads—caught between the weight of an aging workforce and the pressing need for innovation. A demographic shift fueled by a falling birthrate and a rapidly aging population is dramatically thinning the ranks of Japan’s agricultural workers.
According to Japan’s 2020 Census of Agriculture and Forestry, the number of core agricultural workers in private farming dropped by a staggering 394,000 between 2015 and 2020—a 22.4% decline in just five years. From 1.76 million, the number fell to 1.36 million. Even more alarming, nearly 70% of those still working the fields were aged 65 or older. That figure reflects a 4.7% rise in the average age of laborers, highlighting the dwindling presence of young workers in the sector.
If left unchecked, this trend spells trouble not only for Japan’s domestic food production but also for its standing in global agricultural trade. The challenge is clear: Japan must transform its farms into highly efficient, tech-driven operations—or risk a crisis of supply and sustainability.
Enter smart agriculture.
In a bid to counter the looming labor shortage, municipalities, companies, and research institutions across Japan are racing to modernize farming. One standout initiative comes from NTT AgriTechnology Corporation, a subsidiary leveraging cutting-edge information and communication technology (ICT) developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. Their goal? To digitize Japan’s farms and streamline operations—from soil management to crop monitoring—with the precision of data and the power of automation.
As Japan stares down a shrinking workforce and mounting global competition, its future may well depend on how fast it can pivot from aging hands to intelligent farms.
Farming Newbies Grow High-Quality Tomatoes Through Remote Instruction
NTT AgriTechnology, the Tokyo Development Foundation for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation (NTT East) established this three-year project—referred to formally as a collaboration agreement for the implementation of cutting-edge agriculture using private 5G—in 2020. Its aim is to create a Tokyo-based model that could be used to bolster the future of Japanese agriculture. Private 5G provides more stable communication than public 5G and can better respond to immediate problems with crops that need to be addressed on a regular basis.
The project involved setting up greenhouses equipped with private 5G in Chofu City, in Tokyo prefecture, and using them to grow tomatoes. Ultrahigh-resolution cameras, smart glasses and other technologies were also utilized. The environments in the greenhouses were managed fully automatically, with sensors that measured factors like the temperature and indoor CO2 concentration in order to optimize the photosynthesis of the crops.
The project is now in its third year. Nakanishi Masahiro, a project manager of the corporate strategy planning department at NTT East and a core member of the team that set up NTT AgriTechnology said, “Workers with no farming experience were able to grow high-quality tomatoes with remote instruction. We’ve even had better yields from the second year onward, so results have been great.” The project has also managed to establish a local production for local consumption model, with the tomatoes produced in these greenhouses sold within Chofu City or given to local elementary schools.
Cutting-Edge Greenhouses See Visitors From Around the World
The Netherlands and Spain are two countries that have succeeded in using advanced environmental management technologies and labor optimization to establish large-scale agricultural systems. The Netherlands is a particularly compelling example in that it is the second-largest agricultural producing country in the world—with about 40 percent of the area of Japan. Representatives from NTT AgriTechnology visited the Netherlands for agricultural research and were inspired by the semi-automated and standardized operations they saw in the country’s large-scale greenhouse horticulture systems.
To implement something similar in Japan, however, they would have to cope with various environmental changes—including the seasons, with summer’s heat waves and typhoons and winter’s strong snows and sea winds—and compensate for the lack of growers and workers with experience in large-scale greenhouse horticulture. As such, their goal was to develop a facility that could handle a wide variety of circumstances. This was done not only through the expertise the representatives gleaned overseas but also through the addition of monitoring systems that focus on human factors like labor and work management, as well as the digitalization of the facility itself.
Already agriculture professionals and researchers from across the world have come to Tokyo to observe and examine this example of agriculture utilizing private 5G. Regarding the benefits of the project being based in Tokyo rather than elsewhere in Japan, Nakanishi said, “I think the reason we’ve gotten so much attention for this is precisely becausethis smart agriculture site is located in a city like Tokyo that’s easy to visit from abroad.”
NTT AgriTechnology is currently considering the dissemination of these technologies overseas, backed with training on how to use them. Indeed, this Tokyo-based agricultural system could be a key to solving not only the issues faced in the Japanese agricultural world but also the global food crisis.
