Inside Fujitsu s Cloud-powered Farm Of The Future

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Tim Stevens/CNET






The average farm in the United States of America is 449 acres. Ignore the smaller farms on the East Coast and look to an agriculture-focused state like Wyoming, and that average footprint balloons to a whopping 3,743 acres -- one-fourth the size of the island of Manhattan. That's a lot of land, enough that farmers can make big investments and expect big payoffs. An expensive tractor will pay for itself by tilling, haying, and managing more acreage. The same goes for less predictable but equally important farm equipment, like computers running accounting software. Modern megafarms in America are often sophisticated, data-driven enterprises employing dozens or hundreds of people.






The average Japanese farm, Tour Chùa Hương on the other hand, covers less than five acres. It raises only about $50,000 in revenue annually, which pays helpers and buys machinery, Tour Chùa Hương seeds, and other required supplies. At the end of the year, the average Japanese farmer clears just $15,000 of income to support a family, which doesn't leave much for investments in heavy machinery or monolithic software suites to track crop yield or milk production.






Despite its status as a tech-crazed nation, Japanese farms tend to be fairly simple. Farmers generally can't monitor output from one year to the next, and with no data, it's difficult to make smart business decisions.