International comparative study on land consolidation project for sustainable agriculture

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Today in Japan, labor productivity of rice cropping farmers is low. In order to get sufficient agricultural productivity and realize sustainable paddy rice production, it is necessary to enlarge farmers' farm size and construct large rice paddy plots of more than several hectares in size. But in Japan, there are very few areas where such land consolidation project had been carried out, so huge rice paddy plots are concerned to cause some technical problems such as ill drainage, much more time to irrigate, bad leveling condition and so on. In order to clarify whether there are such problems or not and also to clarify how to realize huge sized-rice paddy plots in Japan, investigation on huge sized-rice paddy plots in USA, Australia and Japan was done. Main results are as follows.1) In California and Arkansas in USA, farm managers have been leveling their land with using laser and making huge rice paddy plots of 64ha, 36ha, 32ha for about twenty years. In order to drain and irrigate effectively, farmers dredged temporary ditch around the plots. So it is considered that huge rice paddy plots are preferable as a whole for large size rice farming.2) In NSW in Australia, farm managers have also been leveling their paddy plots. But most of their sizes are not so much huge, around 5ha, because farm sizes were relatively small, around 200ha. And also because farmers use those plots for paddy and other crops rotationally, they need some slope for drainage for other crops.3) In Japan, large size rice paddy plots were realized by consolidating leased land. For such land consolidation, the method of user-right-adjustment was effective.