To be certified organic in Japan and use the official term yuki saibai you need to undergo a rigorous and rather expensive application process. We both have 'real' jobs and farm as a rather time consuming hobby so this is not something we have pursued. We do however farm without the use of any chemicals. We prepare our soil with chook manure from our own chooks, leaf mulch made from buried autumn
leaves and liquid chicken manure. We keep the weeds down with plastic mulch, tractor, grass cutter and good old elbow grease. We remove bugs by hand or just donate buggy produce to the chooks who repay the favour with more manure and so the cycle continues. We rotate crops and rest fields and try to work with the earth and not against it. We even water with river water rather than tap water. However, while we live in a farming community we are surrounded by traditional farmers which means our neighbours do use chemicals to grow their crops. Some use machines to spray. We take measures to avoid inadvertent spraying (we grow a barrier of 2-3 m tall sunflowers at the edge of our vegetable field each year and have barrier strips of land between our rice and wheat fields and the neighbours' fields) and when questioned about the likelihood of my garden being sprayed my nearest neighbour assured me he wouldn't waste expensive chemicals on my crops. Yes? No? It's complicated. But the produce listed here is the same produce I feed my family with confidence that it's as healthy as it gets. That much I CAN say!
