Rice Harvesting, Natural Way in Satoyama

Before taking my mother to the hospital, I went to a rice paddy to shoot some scenes for my video, because my friends were harvesting their rice today.

They do everything manually; from rice planting to harvesting. They grow rice by almost natural farming. They cultivated the field once but they only used rice bran as fertilizers.

So it is somewhere between organic farming and natural farming.

The fact that they grow rice without using a rice planting machine or a combine harvester is very unique in the Japanese countryside. Most farmers use machines and agricultural chemicals. Even organic farmers, many of them use machines.

So we hardly see people doing Hazagake, drying rice naturally under the sun.

In Hino, there are some families, many of them are members of local network, doing Hazagake, so you have a higher chance of seeing it or even experiencing it here.

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