Japan’s Agricultural Workforce Drops Below 1 Million
A Japanese government survey found that the number of core agricultural workers has fallen below 1 million, and their average age is 67.7.
Japan's agricultural workforce has fallen below the one million mark, with the number of core workers dropping by 50,000 or 4.8% in 2026, according to a survey by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. As of 2026, there are 986,600 core agricultural workers, a significant decrease from 2.05 million in 2010. The average age of these workers is 67.7 years, with 56.5% of the workforce being 70 or older.
Only 3.8% of agricultural workers are in their thirties, and just 1.2% are under 30. The total number of agricultural operations decreased by 4.4% to 799,700, with individually operated farms dropping by 4.6% to 759,000 and corporate farms increasing by 1.2% to 40,700. The number of corporate employees involved in agricultural operations rose by 2,600, or 2.6%, to 100,900.
The average farmland size per operation increased by 5.6% to 3.8 hectares, with Hokkaidō seeing a 2.7% increase to 34.6 hectares. Rice cultivation decreased by 7.2% to 499,500 operations, with 58.7% of these using less than one hectare of land.
Written by urgent.news from Nippon.com's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
