The Development of Vegetable Farming in Miura City, a Suburb of Tokyo

Miura City is located in the outskirts of the Tokyo metropolitan area. Taking full advantage of this easy access to an enormous market, it has developed vegetable farming. As the area has been urbanizing, however, the circumstances have been getting worse for farmers. Other producing re-gions have supplied more fresh vegetables and more varieties to the wholesale market in the met-ropolitan area since World War II. As a result, the farmers in Miura City are facing difficulties, not in producing vegetables but in finding new ways to ship their products.<br> The most commonly grown agricultural products of Miura City have been watermelons, daikon (Japanese radish), and cabbages. Recently, however, some farmers have begun to grow pumpkins and melons in place of watermelons.<br> This paper attempts both to explain how each individual farmer has made a decision on crop rotation and to clarify the agricultural situation in Miura City. This is based on our field work in Onori Village, the southern part of Miura City, which has been carried out since 1988.<br> Our findings are summarized as follows:<br> (1) Onori Village is located at the tip of the Miura Peninsula. The major part of the farmland on Onori is on a plateau, and the remainder, formerly used as paddy fields, lies in the bottom of a narrow valley. These paddy fields were converted to vegetable fields as part of a rice crop adjust-ment to solve overproduction problems (Fig. 4).<br> (2) There are 44 farm households in Onori; their total acreage is 48.5 hectares. The number of farm households with one or more male farmers between the ages of 16 and 60 is 32 (72.7%). The abundance of both farmland and farm labor is important to the highly productive farming in this village.<br> (3) Farmland acreage per household in Onori is as follows: 16 households have more than 140 ares, 18 have between 50 and less than 140 ares, and 10 have less than 50 ayes. Many households with less than 140 ares produce melons or pumpkins in place of watermelons in summer in order to rationalize their management. Melons are grown by house-holds with relatively many farm laborers, while pumpkins are grown by those with fewer workers (Fig. 5).<br> (4) Most farmers in this region ship their daikon, cabbages, and pumpkins cooperatively through the Miura Farmers' Cooperative and individually transport watermelons to the markets in Tokyo or Kanagawa Prefecture by truck. These methods of delivering products are important factors supporting the high, stable profitability of this village.<br> (5) Hatsuse Agricultural High School has raised many heirs to the farming tradition in this area, and the Miura Farmers' Cooperative and Miura Agricultural Experiment Station offer ex-tension service to local farmers. These institution also play an important role in the development of agriculture in Miura City.