optimal farming plan

To solve the problems of rice cultivation in Japan, the development of agricultural robots that automate agricultural work is in progress. However, climate change has made it more important recently to consider operations risk associated with rain in assessing the impact of introducing technologies in farming. Therefore, this research aims to evaluate the impact of agricultural robots on an advanced large-scale corporate rice farming, considering operations risk and user’s preference for the risk. First, we constructed a mathematical programing model using FVS-FAPS that incorporates factors limiting the expansion of farm scale, such as operations risk, with reference to data from advanced large-scale corporate rice farming. In addition, comparing the results of the mathematical programing analysis, we evaluated the impact of agricultural robots on optimal acreage, required working hours and production costs. The result indicated that the introduction of agricultural robots in an advanced largescale corporate rice farming would increase the optimal acreage by 0.0-5.5%, and whether or not it would lead to scale expansion largely depended on the user’s preference for the operations risk. In contrast, the agricultural robots contributed to 16.9-26.7% reduction in the required working hours per person. Therefore, the agricultural robots reduced the employment cost per 1 kg of brown rice by 26.6-27.5%. However, including the introduction cost of agricultural robots calculated at the current commercial price, it became clear that the total cost per 1 kg of brown rice increased by 1.4-10.6%. These results suggest that even if the current technical problems of agricultural robots are solved and operational deregulation is implemented, the introduction of agricultural robots does not directly lead to cost reductions, and whether or not it leads to scale expansion depends on the user’s preference for the operations risk.