Two men were working in an area of rice paddies that stretched all around them

Paddy fields spread out on the outskirts of Muang Sing. Laos' staple food is sticky rice called Khao Niew, so there are many paddy fields. As soon as you go outside of the town, you will be in a paddy field area. In the rice paddies spread out in front of me, men were plowing the fields with cultivators in preparation for the upcoming rice planting season. The wave of mechanization has reached this area as well. But the machines were only used for plowing, and the rice planting itself seemed to be done by hand.

I felt that there is a place for agricultural machinery manufacturers such as Yanmar to play an active role in Laos, where a world without rice transplanters is expanding. Incidentally, rice production in Laos is about 3.5 million tons, only about one-third that of Japan. However, in terms of production per capita, it is much higher than in Japan.