Today’s News from the Farm is an interview with Yukiya Ueda (who also goes by Kylo)! He is part of the 2024-2025 Japanese Agricultural Training Program cohort and one of our awesome interns! He came to Full Belly Farm last September and will be with us until the beginning of October when he’ll head to UC Davis for a few months of classes before heading back to Japan at the end of the year. He’s a regular part of the Palo Alto Farmers Market Team and can regularly be seen zipping around the farm on his way to take care of some of the animals.
Here’s a lightly edited version of our conversation from last week after work.
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager
Where did you grow up? Did you come from a farming family?
No. I’m from the city, Yokkaichi.
When did get interested in farming?
When I graduated high school. I was thinking about what I should do with my life and talked with the principal at my school. He used to be a teacher at an agricultural school and he knew that I loved nature. He recommended agriculture college and I said why not? I went to Mie Prefecture Agriculture Junior College. I focused on rice fields and I really liked it. It is a unique part of Japanese agriculture. We’ve been growing rice for so many years and so many people really focus on rice research. It’s interesting and different than other crops. In my program, there was an opportunity to work for two months on a farm and I worked for a rice farm in Ishikawa.
Why did you want to come to the US? Why Full Belly?
In high school, my major was English communication and I’ve been interested in other cultures since I was little. I really like listening to different English accents and I’ve been curious to come here.
An older classmate at school joined this program and a teacher told me about it also. I didn’t know anything about agriculture before Junior College. When I started college, I learned that a lot of Japanese rice farmers are growing just for specific distribution centers. This was the case for other vegetables and fruits too. It all goes to one distribution center. Only a tiny amount goes to farmers markets, right to the consumer. It feels weird to me. I think that farmers should have more opportunities to sell to other places. It seems like tunnel vision; farmers don’t think about marketing. Older farmers especially. Maybe my view was wrong but I thought that in the US it would be different. I wanted to know more about farmers’ lifestyles too. Full Belly has a different style, direct to customers.
What kind of work have you done at Full Belly?
Recently I have been doing a lot of work with the animals. I like it. I had never touched animals before coming to the farm. It’s not something I would’ve done in Japan.
I also go to the farmers market and I help out with other tasks (transplanting, picking, weeding).
What do you like doing most?
I like picking – cherry tomatoes, picking up eggs, greens. Anything as long as it’s not raining!
What’s something you haven’t done yet but want to do?
I want to stake tomatoes. Makoto [a former intern from the 2010s who currently is a Project Coordinator for the JATP Program] talked about doing it here and I’ve wanted to try it, though Andrew told me that we do things differently now. I also want to see more of the packing, like what Panchi’s crew does. I also want to know what happens in the office!
What have you found that’s been surprising?
A lot!
The farm is very rural and the scenery is so different than in Japan. Here, there aren’t many trees in the hills. In Japan the mountains and hills are covered with trees.
The fact that we have our own delivery trucks and drivers – maybe the issue is that I hadn’t seen farms as big in Japan, or that they were rice farms but I had never seen that.
Tractors and trucks get used for a longer time here. We also have a lot of equipment to fix. Alex [the mechanic] always has so much to do. In Japan, people buy new planters for rice every 3-5 years.
Another difference is that in Japan, you never step on the beds where the plants go. You jump over from furrow to furrow. Here, we aren’t supposed to stand on the beds, but we can if we need to.
Off the farm, people drive so fast on the highways, and the speed limit in the city is also much, much faster. Driving here feels dangerous. The highways are so much bigger.
Favorite thing that we grow to eat?
Jimmy Nardello peppers, sungold cherry tomatoes, cipollini onions, strawberries. I hadn’t had Jimmy Nardellos before coming here. I just thought that peppers were peppers. I didn’t know that there were so many varieties and tastes.
Do you have plans yet for what you will do after you leave the farm?
I think I want to work for a distribution company – the companies that buy from the farmers and send their produce to other places. These companies are necessary. But I don’t want the farmers to be limited to just one company. I want farmers to have a lot of options.
Later I want to return to farming. In Japan, it seems like most people start farming when they’re older (40 or 50).
