Previously: A girl from Taiwan, China went to the Tanaka family in Miyazaki, Japan to help with farming, jumping into a traditional Japanese farm household and the realities of farm work, and wrote a farming diary. [Miyazaki Farming Diary]04: The decisive battle in harvest season, Japanese fruit growers on edge, working the front lines of packaging on their own production line!

After September 27, we entered a new wave of harvesting. Because the area planted with Nichinan No. 1 at the Tanaka family is very large, after the stage when JA stopped buying mandarins from farmers, the most important task now is to harvest the mandarins as quickly as possible and sell them at the fruit and vegetable market. So at this stage, for the Tanaka family's largest area of Nichinan No. 1, regardless of size, everything is cut except fruit that is too green or severely sunburned (sunburn causes the flesh to dry out and become juiceless).

As a result, the harvest volume in the second stage is much greater than when sending fruit to JA in the first stage. If more than eight workers are on the job that day, there is a chance of exceeding 2000 kg. The whole day's schedule also changed from picking fruit all day from eight to five, to picking fruit in the orchard from eight to three, then after the three o'clock break everyone moving to the warehouse at home to sort and pack fruit until five.

Building Good Relationships with the Market, Shipping Consistency Is Key

Every day we pick "shizaku" and "Nichinan No. 1," then pack them separately and send them to the market. Isn't that a lot of work? Why not spend one whole day picking Nichinan No. 1 and then sorting and packing, and the next whole day picking "Shizuku of the Sun" and then sorting and packing, so that each day you only need to pack one variety? Wouldn't that be more convenient?

Nobu says that because farmers need to maintain relationships with people at the market, it is better to have goods going into the market every day. Although many farmers now agree in advance on which days they will ship, for older farmers with more traditional thinking, they still feel they must ship to the market every day, and that is why they keep to the schedule of harvesting and packing two kinds of mandarins at the same time. (To be continued in the diary.)

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