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The story
A thread on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board titled “Is it actually easy to become a farmer if you want to?” turned into a debate over the hurdles facing new farmers. The thread starter said they wanted to start farming because they didn’t want to work for someone else and craved a life of “farming when it’s sunny, reading when it rains” — and replies piled up covering everything from the difficulty of acquiring farmland to public support systems like municipal and JA (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives) farming consultation desks and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries’ agricultural improvement extension division. But the thread split between those saying “rice farming is simple work even people in their 70s can do” and those countering that “the reality is grueling, with tractor work running past midnight” — and that gap between farming’s image and its reality became the central argument.
What people said
And you can't become a farmer without farmland.
It just costs more, but you can farm on residential or commercial land too.
Yeah, that's exactly the image.
Everyone says there's a labor shortage, but it feels like the barriers are so high you can't even get started.
Why are you assuming you have to start out as a business owner right away?
So what's the normal route, then?
No, that's not it.
I don't want to be employed.
It's not that I don't want to deal with people or take orders, though.
Then just buy or rent land and start working it.
Whether you can make a living off it, no idea.
Even if you don't want to be employed,
go talk to your local JA first
and make sure you've got everything you need lined up.
If all you want is to buy farmland, you can buy as much as you want through a realtor.
Your city or prefecture will give you free farming consultations.
There are even paid training programs.
I'm guessing OP is just the "doesn't want to work" type.
Didn't know stuff like that existed.
But it's kind of embarrassing to go in for a consultation with such a naive mindset.
if you can't communicate with people, farming isn't for you.
A home garden, maybe, but that's about it.
These days you can sell stuff on Mercari (a Japanese flea-market app)
without talking to anyone, though?
I'd like to spend something like 5 years learning hands-on — about crops, about everything it takes to actually sell them as a product, and about assets and rights and all that.
Try hydroponics in your room first — basil, shiso, or cilantro in a plastic bottle with a sponge or something.
Online it looks like it's super easy, but it's actually incredibly hard.
Why would you grow something weird like "xiangcai" (the Chinese name for cilantro)…
I grew a few herbs here and there, but there was no use for them, so I turned them all into tea and gave up.
You live a more decent life as a salaried worker.
I'd heard endless stories from my mom about how hard farming is, so I never felt like taking over.
Have you never heard stories about how hard being a salaried worker is?
Because you can quit being a salaried worker any time.
I've been a salaried worker for over 10 years, and I think it's easier than farming.
But farmers have to work rain or no rain.
You don't need to be a farmer to live that "sun-plow, rain-read" life.
How about becoming a hunter? They're short on people.
I got invited to do trapping, but in the end you have to kill the animal, and I hate seeing blood.
It's work done by people whose average age is past 70, so there's no way it's hard.
Whether you can actually make money at it is a separate question, though.
That's definitely a lie.
Near my place there's a guy out working a rice field with a tractor at like 8pm.
A tractor, in a rice field…
There's a slight chance it's a contractor hired by JA.
Huh? You plow in fall, winter, and spring.
You do it after your day job ends, or on weekends.
In fact I just helped with rice harvesting today — it rained the whole time, it was rough.
No, there's absolutely no reason it has to be done at night.
It's because the work isn't finished that you end up still at it after dark.
If the tractor breaks down midway, you fix it yourself right there.
I've worked straight through until it was pitch black because the job just wasn't done.
I don't care about your personal situation.
There's always that type who's great at the "look how hard I'm working" act.
Doesn't realize coworkers rate them low while the boss somehow likes them.
I've helped kill wild boars caught in box traps a few times — the adults resist silently to the end, but the piglets get terrified and scream.
Once you hear that, you can't bring yourself to do the killing.
Butchering them afterward, though, I was fine with that.
I've got a war story where I caught a wild boar with my bare hands.
Though it was young enough that even calling it a "piglet" feels generous.
Terrifying.
Seems impossible unless you zap it with electricity first and then bleed it out.
Is it really that easy to get started?
I'm guessing it's what comes after that's tough.
Why skip right past the municipality and prefecture and go straight to the Ministry of Agriculture…
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Acquiring farmland is subject to a permit system under the Farmland Act, so the thread’s claim that “you can’t buy farmland unless you’re a farmer” is half right and half a misunderstanding. In reality, the requirement is approval from the local Agricultural Committee, and the lower area-limit requirement that used to exist (in principle 50a or more) was abolished in a 2023 revision of the law — meaning there is now more room than before for non-farmers to acquire land after going through a certain screening process. On the other hand, as the thread points out, consultation desks for new farmers run by municipalities and JA, along with support systems such as stipends during training periods like the Next-Generation Farmers Investment Fund, genuinely exist, and public support for people starting farming from zero is more developed than one might expect. Where the discussion split was between the view that “rice farming is simple work even the elderly can do” and the view that “the reality involves grueling tractor work late into the night” — both are real facets of actual farming, but the thread never quite resolved how much labor conditions vary depending on the crop and the scale of the operation.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (“Nandemo Jikkyo G”) thread “Is it actually easy to become a farmer if you want to?.”
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