The Dairy Capital of Japan Taking Responsibility for Our Future

The question that changed my life

I am in Memuro-cho, located near the center of the Tokachi plain. It’s a very green town, with 42% of its land being used as farmland, and 40% covered with forest, through which flows the clear water of three rivers that make their way down from the mountains. In this attractive town sits Oak Leaf Ranch, one of the first farms in Japan to stop feeding its cows antibiotics, and known for the high quality of its beef. The farm holds 4,000 cattle spread over 76 hectares of land, and is managed by Haruyoshi Kashiwaba, owner of an unusually wide smile and some unusually long ear lobes.

The Kashiwaba family settled in Tokachi more than 100 years ago. Haruyoshi, the current Mr. Kashiwaba, made the decision to take over the farm because of a question that occurred to him when he was a high school student: why should the wife of the farming family have to work so hard? “It was about the traditional responsibilities of the women in the family. If a woman gets married to an office worker, she can be a full-time housewife if she chooses. But the farmer’s wife has to both work in the fields like a man, and do the housework at home. I hardly ever saw my mother sleep. Why should her work have so much duty and so little joy? I wanted to free my mother from such a strange situation”.

At the time, the family business focussed on dairy farming and arable farming, but Haruyoshi decided to concentrate on beef cattle.

“I think my parents felt unable to object, because I had taken over the biggest debt in town as well”, he laughs. “At that time, there was no word like wa-gyu [Japanese beef]; it was not popular even within Japan. I was also told that beef cows were not at all profitable. However, my goal was to relieve the pressure on my mother, so I aimed to make a profit, like a professional company, rather than seeing it as a family business. Honestly speaking, that was a time when I was much too profit-oriented”.

Am I really proud of my work?

A big turning point came for him in 1995. He confessed that he could not have confidence to recommend his own beef to tourist from Honshu, “mainland” of Japan, who were invited to stay at self-built log house located in the farm. He didn’t even think twice about the usage of the growth hormones and antibiotics. However, he started questioning again- “is it really natural to use these for living creatures for the sake of the short-term profits?”. His answer was “No” and he started to change immediately.

“Needless to say, producing beef without antibiotics is more expensive than doing so with them. But I knew that cost is always an easy excuse to reach for when you want to avoid addressing a problem, and I was a big fan of the TV documentary ‘Project X’ [a hit TV program that featured seemingly impossible business challenges], and I thought if I went through these struggles and difficulties, I might be invited to appear on it. So I just thought I would do my best, and hopefully achieve something impressive. I estimated I could only survive three years without making any profits, but I was convinced that this was something worth doing, and I was confident that it was a decision that would eventually lead me somewhere interesting”.

This decision was made against a set of events that shocked the Japanese public: the BSE crisis - which Haruyoshi calls “human’s blasphemy against the gods” - and a subsequent series of scandals about false labelling of meat products. Dissatisfaction with the beef industry, which had hidden the inconvenient truth for many years, hit epidemic levels, and the reputation of domestic beef hit an absolute low, negatively impacting sales. Haruyoshi decided that this was a crisis that could also generate opportunity, and his solution was simple: to let the consumers choose.

“The sales process was like a black box; the farmers raising the cows couldn’t even set the retail price. So I decided to have faith in the consumers, and let them make their own decisions. After about a year, some people started to understand what I was doing, and orders gradually increased. The first one was a supermarket in Shikoku who understood that safe, quality beef would cost more money. I felt like buyers were catching on”.

This spirit of experimentation is on display at the present Oak Leaf Ranch. Milk given to the calves every morning by Mamoru, Haruyoshi’s younger brother and the farm’s administrator, is warmed to 40° C. Instead of antibiotics, a combination of herbs is used, which varies depending on the health condition of the calves. Above the private space that each calf is allocated, a board indicates when the calves started to eat grass for the first time, so that they are not accidentally given milk instead. “The same as with humans, the very young are most susceptible to illness”, says Mamoru.

“It’s 19 months until we ship these cows, but the eventual quality of the meat is dependent on their living conditions from birth. Around two years after stopping antibiotics, we had an increase in calves getting sick. It is a delicate process to raise cattle without antibiotics. The feed we give the cows has to be both nutrition and medicine, so we pay a lot of attention to it; we avoid genetically modified crops or crops which use pesticides post-harvest. In exchange for the feed we use, we provide the local farmers with cow dung that they can use as compost. Depending on the season and the condition of the cow, the food blend will change. We also recycle the bed and the litter of the calves into fertilizer. Tokachi is a gifted land; we can find everything we need here”.

“Although they are a little cowardly, cows are very curious animals”, he smiles. As well as the feed, they have to be careful about the other aspects of rearing cattle; they have to be careful not to over-stimulate the calves. Charcoal is used to disinfect materials coming in from outside, to prevent them being a source of infection. Quality is also a focus; the farm produces special “Oak veal”, made from cows that have been raised eating only milk. Despite all this progress, I sense the difficulty of the path they have had to walk when Mamoru murmurs to himself “it’s still hard to get back the trust that our industry once lost, though”.

There are other ways in which Oak Leaf Ranch, and Hokkaido more generally, demonstrates its pioneering spirit. They started exporting beef before it was common, and started buying feed from farmers in Russia. Haruyoshi’s next ambition is to re-energize the local region. The Daicho no Takumi restaurant at the Tokachigawa hot spring provides beef from local ranches, at a price unthinkable in Tokyo.

I want to change the popular image of agriculture. It’s not just about making food; it’s also about tourism, maintaining nature, and even improving mental health. I’ve personally only done two difficult things: one, making a decision to go for it – and two, taking the responsibility for whatever the outcome happens to be”, he grins. These people who grow up under the broad, open skies of Tokachi also seem to grow up with broad, open minds.