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Abstract:
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"During the summer and fall of 1993, all of modern Japan came to feel directly the riskiness of agriculture. The rice harvest was the worst in decades, the price of domestic rice skyrocketed, and japan was forced to import large quantities of rice to Australia, China, Thailand and the United States. Contemporary rice production in Japan is certainly modern, and many of the developments of recent decades have been introduced to reduce the chance of bad harvests--disease resistant seed varieties, heavy fertilizer use, pesticides and perhaps the most important, effective water control. The list of scientific and engineering improvements is long--yet none of this could compensate for the extended cool period that robbed the fields of the essential weeks of hot weather needed to produce a good crop. If farming today represents a crap shoot, then readers can perhaps extrapolate from that awareness back fifty to one hundred years ago when seed varieties were fewer, water control less developed, insecticides non-existent, and fertilizers were limited largely to that produced locally."
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