From Civil Engineering to Soil: Companies Tackling the Challenge of Organic Agriculture (circa 2006)

From Civil Engineering to Soil: Companies Tackling the Challenge of Organic Agriculture (circa 2006)

In the early 2000s, Japan's local construction industry was at a crossroads in its management, as sales and orders became unstable due to the wave of public works cutbacks. Against this backdrop, local construction companies began to steer their businesses into new fields that had contact with local resources, such as agriculture, while making use of their existing technology and human resources. In particular, the challenges of these companies, which continued to engage in trial and error while interacting with and learning from farmers based on the keywords "compost making," "recycling-oriented agriculture," and "coexistence with the local community," offer a humanistic scene of conversation.

In 2000, however, the company established an agricultural production corporation called "Aguri" and began growing rice and vegetables using no agricultural chemicals or chemical fertilizers on abandoned farmland in the region. The company operated with an emphasis on "soil cultivation" through building relationships with local farmers, composting food residues, and attempting to convert domestic waste and construction by-products into fertilizer resources. The project also played a role in helping elderly farmers cope with idle rice paddies by leasing land on the condition that they would take care of the idle paddies and promise to grow organically.

This initiative also had the potential to divert employment to rice and vegetable cultivation, making use of employees from the construction sector. During off-seasons when public works projects are scarce, construction engineers are assigned to farmland management and field maintenance, thereby protecting the employment of employees and ensuring the continuity of their skills.

Gamano Construction in Yamagata Village, Iwate Prefecture, acquired a closed local fertilizer factory and began producing compost from cow manure and broadleaf tree bark. In 2003, the company began using its own compost to grow spinach with low pesticide use, and the following year converted an affiliated company into an agricultural corporation. The following year, the company converted its affiliate to an agricultural corporation and began shipping to the Tokyo metropolitan area under the "Agri-Gamano" brand. The initial investment amounted to more than 200 million yen, but the company has grown to earn 150 million yen annually from sales of compost and crops. The farmers taught him the importance of soil cultivation, and the way he shaped his business while learning from each other was the result of a series of on-the-spot dialogues and challenges.

Kitahama Construction of Enbetsu-cho, Hokkaido, similarly established the agricultural corporation Alita in 2002 by composting cow manure, a byproduct of dairy farming, and fish meal from a fishing cooperative, and under the guidance of an NPO, produced organically grown pumpkins and soybeans that won high praise at a department store in Sapporo. However, he was unable to obtain bank financing for his construction business, which he closed in 2003, and he switched completely to farming. He obtained JAS organic certification for his pumpkins and appealed to consumers with a story of "recycling-oriented agriculture using local resources.

What all three cases have in common is that the construction companies, under pressure to break away from their dependence on public works projects, have turned to agriculture, with compost production at the core. There is a crossroads between an attitude of "learning" by listening to the wisdom of farmers and a will to "contribute to the environment" by recycling local resources. One can imagine the humanistic conversations that support the business, with comments exchanged on site such as, "This compost will strengthen the roots," and "The soil will respond, although the harvest is still some time away. Against the backdrop of the organic farming boom and the desire for food safety in 2006, the efforts of these companies were a small light in the revitalization of rural areas.