Paradigm of value-driven and community-based precision farming

This paper describes a Japanese model of community-based precision farming and learning groups of farmers and companies. The community-based precision farming is a new regional farming system to get high profitability and reliability under regional and environmental constraints, promoted by wisdom farmers and technology platform, through creating both information-oriented fields and information-added products, with supply chain management of field to table. Two participating local learning groups are: a technology driven "Precision farming network of Toyohashi-Atsumi (PFNET)" in Toyohashi city and a farmers' learning group "Honjo precision farming society (HPFS)" in Honjo city. PFNET is aimed at realising a total system of technologies in precision farming with agriculture-linked industries and wisdom and skills of farmers. HPFS (Honjo) strives to produce information-added products and information-oriented fields, and also grows them as new Honjo branded products. The first action was a market research on information-added products through in-shop experiments.

Keywords: information-oriented field, information-added products, innovation, business model, learning groups, community based precision farming, technology driven precision farming, regional farming, Japan, precision agriculture, small-scale farms