Sustainable paddy farming in rural Japan: Leveraging farmer integration and agricultural UAVs for synergistic solutions

For sustainable rice farming, IoT-based smart agricultural technologies are attracting worldwide attention. In particular, agricultural UAVs, which are expected to be utilized in various seasonal processes of rice farming, are a facility that is expected to spread in the future. In Japan, however, the smooth spread of UAVs has not progressed because of uncertainty about the effectiveness of their introduction. In this study, we clarify the effect of the introduction and its limitations by simulating the synergy effect between customary management improvement methods by farmers' integration and the efficiency improvement of agricultural work using UAVs, using a mountainous area in Japan as an example. The visualization of the expected increase in labor productivity provides a strong basis for future policies to promote smart agricultural technologies. The simulation model was built on the theoretical basis of the optimal route search based on the traveling salesman problem, in which the farmer's behavior of visiting farmland is considered a traveling salesman problem, and the effect of introducing UAVs was predicted using annual working hours as an evaluation index. The results showed that the introduction of UAVs could achieve a greater reduction in labor hours than the case where farmer integration alone was used to improve labor productivity without the introduction of UAVs. In other words, the combination of farmer integration and UAVs is expected to synergize. However, even when assuming reasonable UAVs performance, labor productivity improved by about 20%, and even when using high-performance UAVs assuming drastic technological innovation, labor productivity improved by only about 30%. Furthermore, as the number of farmlands to be managed increased, the effect of UAVs was expected to reach a ceiling. In other words, the results suggest an appropriate size of farmland to manage by introducing UAVs. This result is expected to be convincing material to promote the introduction of UAVs to farmers in the future and to make a practical contribution to their management plans. • UAVs and farmer integration can help overcome challenges posed by aging farm households in paddy farming. • Farmer integration is crucial for reducing labor time in paddy farming under aging communities. • UAVs can benefit agriculture by reducing the burden of paddy management, but not enough. • Collaboration is key to implementing practical solutions for sustainable paddy farming proposed in the study. • For sustainable rice farming in rural Japan, UAVs and farmer integration have more potential.