Hokkaido’s Harvest Scenery: Autumn Edition
Hokkaido is known as Japan's food base, and is a treasure trove of a wide variety of foods, such as agricultural and livestock products, seafood, wine, sake and beer.
Autumn – from September to November – is the harvest season for fruits, potatoes and other root vegetables, rice, buckwheat and the like. It is also when marine products such as salmon and Pacific saury are landed.
We have gathered together some ‘taste of autumn’ harvest scenery, much anticipated by the people of Hokkaido.
Special feature
Harvest autumn mosaic
A blue and orange mosaic appeared in a field in the Kitami region, which boasts the largest onion production quantity in Japan. The color layout of that mosaic in the shape of a perfect square looks just like a QR code.
The objects making up the mosaic are iron shipping storage units filled with approximately 1.3 tons of onions. Each unit is 120 centimeters long, 180 centimeters wide, and 130 centimeters tall. To preserve the dry conditions after harvest, they have been covered with two colors of water-resistant tarps.
Kitami based farmer Okazaki Masashi (31), who owns the field, commented laughingly, “This is just us lining the units up to make counting easier. The color of the sheets has no particular significance.” Later, the shipping units will be transported by truck to a JA Kitamirai (Kitami) packing center. The unit layout was also chosen to make loading easier.
JA Kitamirai expects to ship approximately 240,000 tons this season, which is normal for an average year. Consolidating and shipping work will continue until late October, when these QR code patterns fade together with the progression of autumn.
Location
Kitami City
Special feature
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