Today, Japan is a giant battleground of branded types of rice. Reliability, safety and fine taste are now taken for granted, as new types of rice come on the scene all over the country, and battle it out for victory. The fact is that rice simply doesn’t taste all that different depending on the variety. So nowadays, rice farmers can’t just differentiate themselves from the competition by advertising their farming methods or using appealing packaging. To appeal to consumers, they have to tell a story as well.

So, the idea was to launch a branded variety of rice that would be the flagship product for Uwa-cho, which is an outstanding location for growing rice. What requirements would need to be met to do that? What was unique about Uwa-cho? What did it have that other areas didn’t? When we sat down and thought about it, the answer was clear: mikan oranges.

Ehime Prefecture is renowned for its mikan oranges, and it has a lot of delicious varieties. At the same time, the mikan orange industry leaves behind a lot of waste pulp when it produces fruit juice. Some of this gets reused as animal and fish feed, but it has to be said that most of it gets disposed of as industrial waste material.

Using the same waste mikan orange pulp, we had already been working on producing an organic fertilizer. With the use of effective micro-organisms, we succeeded in producing Mikan Bokashi mikan orange fermented organic fertilizer with ingredients such as rice bran and rice chaff. Fermented with yeast and lactic acid bacteria, Mikan Bokashi decomposes slowly as the soil heats up, so it doesn’t disturb the chemical balance that rice plants need for their growth. The rice from plants fertilized with Mikan Bokashi turns out delicious, because the action of the beneficial bacteria produces firmly rooted, heathy rice plants that absorb neither too much nor too little nutrition.

Grown using pure water on rice terraces rich in minerals, with abundant sunlight and sea breezes, in concert with the sustainable cultivation of mikan oranges on cultivated satoyama-terrain plateau slopes with major variations in temperature, we’re confident that our branded Tariki rice will be a flagship rice product not only for Seiyo City, but for Ehime.