Income of ¥1.57M in year one of farming, ¥2.42M of which was subsidies. A bag of bok choy at ¥120 was priced below cost

It’s not unusual for a new-farmer article to report “year-one income.” But it’s rare to find one that also adds in labor costs for the farmer and spouse, converted at minimum wage, and then displays the resulting negative number.

“Sawachin’s Real-Time New Farmer Diary,” serialized on the agriculture media outlet SMART AGRI, does exactly that. “Sawachin” (representative of Kokechin Farm), who made a U-turn move to Tokushima and began farming in 2021, has been publishing quarterly gross profit, expenses, and labor costs, plus a full-year income statement, as actual figures throughout the series.

First, the quarterly numbers

Episode 8 published the breakdown for Q1 2021 (April-June). The author is explicit about why they chose Q1 over Q2: “because Q2 had almost no sales”. They took a long summer break in their first year of farming.

Here’s the labor-cost breakdown. Combined working hours for the couple over April-June totaled 574 hours, averaging 190 hours/month. Estimating that the author worked roughly double their spouse’s hours, they allocate 120 hours/month to themselves and 70 hours/month to their spouse. Calculating this at Tokushima Prefecture’s minimum wage of ¥824 (as of October 2021) gives ¥296,640 for the author and ¥173,040 for the spouse, totaling ¥469,680.

Excluding labor cost, income would be ¥229,362, ¥76,454 per month. The author writes: “This makes it hard to make a living, and I found myself getting a bit discouraged, wondering what to do.”

The turning point was the moment the basis for pricing changed

If there’s one point where the trajectory of this series shifts, it lies not in sales or acreage but in the moment the basis for the “¥120” price switched from household wishful thinking to cost accounting.

The author explains why they originally set the bok choy price at ¥120 (excluding tax) per bag: it reflected a wish rooted in their own household budget, “enough volume for one side dish for a family of four = ¥120.” It’s a price worked backward from the buyer’s wallet, with no producer-side cost factored in.

In episode 8, the author checks for themselves whether that ¥120 is actually correct. Setting a target monthly income of ¥300,000, they find they’re short by ¥36,046 against a subsidy-boosted monthly income of ¥263,954. Taking the 4,187 bags shipped that quarter as the denominator, and assuming a 30% shipping commission, they solve for the required markup x:

4,187 bags × (1 − 0.3) × x = ¥36,046 × 3 months → 0.7x ≈ ¥26 → x = ¥37

The conclusion: the required price is ¥154 (excluding tax) per bag. ¥120 → ¥154, a roughly 28% price increase was needed. That’s the answer that came out of the cost calculation.

Nothing changed abruptly in the numbers on that day. What changed was the foundation of the judgment. From then on, the series stopped asking “how much can I sell this for?” and started asking “how much do I need to sell it for, for this to work?” In the author’s own words: “Looking back and calculating it this way, you can see what the appropriate price for you really is”, while immediately adding the caveat, “But whether the appropriate price is also a price people will actually pay is a separate question.”

What the full-year statement showed — 66% of the earnings came from miscellaneous income

Episode 12 published the full-year 2021 income statement.

Income comes to ¥3,657,897 − ¥2,080,145 = ¥1,577,752.

There’s a subtraction worth doing here. Sales of ¥1,240,597 minus expenses of ¥2,080,145 comes to −¥839,548 (this site’s calculation). Isolating just the growing-and-selling activity, year one ran a loss of roughly ¥840,000. The reported income of ¥1.57 million is entirely propped up by ¥2,417,300 in miscellaneous income.

The pillars of that miscellaneous income cited in the article are the “Next-Generation Farmer Investment Fund, Business Startup Type” (¥2.25 million per year for the couple, of which ¥1.125 million was disbursed in October), the “Employment Ice Age Generation New Farmer Promotion Program” (¥750,000 each in October 2021 and February 2022), and a regional equipment repair subsidy booked in November. Episode 8 also converts the ¥2.25 million annual figure into a monthly ¥187,500, adding it to income to arrive at the ¥263,954 monthly figure.

One more back-calculation on unit price from gross profit: 4,187 bags × ¥120 = ¥502,440 against the recorded gross profit of ¥436,027. The difference of ¥66,413 corresponds to the shipping commission, working out to roughly 13% (this site’s calculation). The markup calculation had assumed a 30% commission, so the actual commission rate differs from that assumption. Solving again at 13% would yield a smaller required markup. This reads as a real-world example of how, even for one’s own business numbers, the answer shifts depending on which assumptions you plug in.

What actually worked was “having kept records”

The factor that really made a difference in this case wasn’t cultivation technique or sales channels. It was having kept records.

574 hours of labor, 4,187 bags shipped, expenses broken down by category, with these three in hand, both the calculation converting labor into minimum wage and the calculation solving for the necessary per-bag price became possible. The fact that episode 5 of the series was titled “Recordkeeping Matters for New Farmers! I Tried Using ‘Agri Note’” shows that recordkeeping was a conscious practice from the very start of farming.

The flip side is that without records, you’re stuck at “it kind of feels too cheap.” Having, from year one, a mechanism to determine whether ¥120 was right or wrong was decisive.

Another factor at work is having narrowed to a single crop. Because “one bag of bok choy” is a fixed unit, dividing total expenses by the number of bags gives a unit cost directly. With ten different crops, this calculation would become far more cumbersome.

In episode 10, the author self-grades their year: 70 points on yield (repeatedly discarding large quantities of bok choy due to pest damage, with almost no harvest from August to October), 80 points on working hours (time-per-container is decreasing). They then write: “If I could find a standard that produces the same result no matter who does it, so many things would get easier.” This drive to reduce the work from personal craft to a repeatable standard comes from the same root as the habit of keeping records.

What didn’t work, and the limits

Clear failures remain in this first year as well. Nearly no harvest from August to October. Repeated large-scale disposal due to pest damage. And the online shop that was planned in episode 7 but still not launched by episode 8. The reason the author gives for not opening it is that “there’s a lot to decide beyond just buying and selling the product, order management, inventory management, customer management.” A pricing problem meant to give them freedom in setting prices is blocked by the weight of administrative work.

Field acreage expanded from roughly 12a to 20a. This reaches the level a senior farmer, among others including a mentor, had told them right after their move, “you need at least 2 tan (20a)”, by newly renting farmland that came with a greenhouse. But as the author themselves writes, “I was able to achieve this thanks to various connections,” acquiring farmland is a matter of connections more than effort.

What generalizes and what doesn’t

What can be replicated is the calculation framework itself. Record your own and your family’s working hours, convert them into cost using the regional minimum wage. Fix a single unit (a bag, a job, an hour), and divide total expenses by that count. Work backward from a target income to derive the required unit price. These three steps can be applied with the same hand-motion to any individual business outside farming.

What can’t be replicated is equally clear.

First, the subsidies. The 66% of first-year income that came from miscellaneous income is only available to those who meet requirements like “new entrant to farming” and “Employment Ice Age Generation.” Without these two, first-year income would have stayed at −¥840,000. Anyone considering a side business or independence who takes away only “income of ¥1.57 million” from this case would be badly misled.

Second, the level of Tokushima Prefecture’s minimum wage, ¥824 (as of October 2021), used in converting labor cost. Doing the same calculation at urban wage levels would widen the loss even further. The wages and cost of living in the destination area are working in tandem here.

Third, the farmland and the mentor. Both the expansion to 20a and the setting of “2 tan” as a target level rest on relationships with senior farmers in the region.

Honesty in disclosing numbers, and the fact that those numbers don’t apply to everyone, can coexist. The value of this series lies in maintaining the former without hiding the latter.

Related reading

• Month one was ¥400/hour — the full sales record of four months running a kitchen car — the same hand-motion of converting one’s own labor into an hourly wage and facing the loss head-on, applied to an actual storefront
• 24 books of Kindle publishing earning ¥50,000-70,000/month in royalties — how unit price × volume builds income, and the relationship between pricing and quantity in individual business