都市農業地域における露地野菜栽培の存在形態

Abstract

The city of Higashikurume, which located in the western suburb of Tokyo Metropolitan area, has been urbanized amazingly since 1960, because of the outward expansion of the urban area from warded areas in the Inner Tokyo. As the result, most of the farm lands and farmhouses are scattered among the urban areas. However, the rate of cultivated land and of the farmers whose income is mainly from farming are both above the average of those in the Northern Tama District. Uuder these circumstances, its total agricultural income (mainly by growing vegetables in the open air) is in the 3rd place among the 18 cities in that district.In this paper the auther explains through his field works the reason why the open-air cultivation of vegetables are still kept in Higashikurume-city.The summaries of this research are as follows:1. Nowadays, in Higashikurume the following three main types of farmers are engaged in growing vegetables in the open air, full-time farmers who mainly grow vegetables, farmers who grow them while they are engaged in real estate as their side job and farmers only for maintaing their farms as property. However, the leading part of the vegetable-growing farmers in Higashikurume area the first two types of them. The farm lands owned by these two types of the farms maintain their cultivation, authorized as agricultual uses and free of the same amount of tax to residential land. The farmers whose income from agricultural products is no more than 50% of their total incomes own their small cultivated lands as only for property and grow vegetables mainly for themselves.2. The full-time farmers who mainly grow vegetables own fairly large farm lands of around 200a. Because of being located in the high land price area, they plan with the combination of several kinds of vegetables all around the year, mainly those like spinach they can be sure of earning high income. With their great skill of farming, they earn high income by producing and forwarding spinach to the market during summer. Because normally it is so difficult to grow it during summer that the amount of its forwarding from other places are extremely small. Farming is, actually, done only by their family because of high wadges, and they also produce vegetables with the combination of several kinds of them to make it possible to work all around the year. And at the same time, they maintain their cultivation by planning crop rotation system in order to prevent the troubles derived from planting the same crop repeatedly and under these conditions of high land price and high wadges.