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Toyota's cloud-based agricultural service to be used in central Japan

Xinhua, February 27, 2015 Adjust font size:

An agricultural cooperative in central Japan will start using a cloud-based agricultural IT management service developed by Toyota Motor Corporation to boost agricultural productivity, announced Toyota on Thursday.

The service, created primarily for businesses, will be available to farms under the umbrella of the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA) group in central Japan's Aichi Prefecture, and will be provided by Toyota Media Service Corporation, said Toyota in a release.

Toyota's service is cloud-based, and can be easily accessed using a smartphone or tablet. "It was created to help boost agricultural productivity using Toyota's experience with production control systems and process improvements in the automotive industry," said the company.

Using a database of information related to rice fields and cultivation work, the service can automatically generate daily work plans that optimize the actions of multiple people over multiple fields.

Since April 2014, nine rice growing agricultural enterprises in central Japan's Aichi and Ishikawa prefectures have been using this service, and this year, the service will be introduced for a trial period at four farms in Aichi prefecture. Full-scale rollout across Aichi prefecture is planned from 2016 onward.

JA Group Aichi, a branch of Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, and Toyota will offer support to farms during the introduction of this service, such as assistance in carrying out cloud-based registration of farmland information. In addition, Toyota will provide advice about improving on-site work methods, while JA Group Aichi will develop performance improvement plans for farms.

Recently in Japan, increasing numbers of small-scale farmers and landowners have been entrusting land cultivation to large- scale agricultural cooperatives.

To address the needs of this growing farming model and make it more efficient, Toyota developed the IT tool as a means to organize data gathered from independent field laborers into a central database so that work on scattered, independent rice farms can be better managed. Endi