Machinery utilization and management organization in Japanese rice farms: Comparison of single‐family, multifamily, and community farms

Improving the efficiency of machinery utilization is crucial in modern arable farming. As farms expand in scale, they need more machines, and more complex forms of organization are required to manage the appropriate and efficient utilization of an increasing number of machinery. In this study, we investigated relatively large‐scale rice farms in Japan and assessed the relationship between the types of organization and farm attributes, such as farmland conditions and human resources. While adjusting this effect with propensity scores, we then estimated how the type of organization affects the number of major machines and machine workdays. When compared on a same‐scale, same condition basis, family farms were the most sparing in the use of machinery, and even the farmland concentration effect, achieved by community farms, could not compensate for this difference. Our findings also indicated that nonfamily farms achieved high levels of machinery utilization with a greater operational scale (L23, M11, Q12).