The right information for the right career selection: can it assist Japan to achieve agricultural sustainability?

The sustainability of farming communities in Japan has become quite challenging because of the current aging population phenomenon. This situation gets more complicated with the fact that more than 70% of secondary school youth desire to have jobs related to science and technology, and no one wishes to adopt farming as their career path. The latest studies indicate that misinformation related to agricultural farming is the main reason that youth move away from adopting farming as their career option. In this research, all three pillars of sustainability have been encircled and the youth’s perception related to typhoons and farmers’ perception related to delayed snowfall tendency in recent times have been examined by using remote sensing data. A survey was conducted to observe the career selection trends of the youth at Sapporo Kaisei Secondary School located in Hokkaido. Though the students have prior information about the farming activities related to this research, it was found that among 313 participants, no one wanted to become a farmer. The cited reasons were mainly related to misinformation. With the help of Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA) officials, a follow-up event was arranged at Sapporo Kaisei Secondary School, and the youth were provided with correct information related to the farming profession. A questionnaire was administered to observe the effectiveness of the event. The results indicate that once correct information was provided, around 82% (23 out of 28) of the participants either strongly agreed or agreed to adopt farming as their career path. These results indicate that appropriate career counseling should be designed after analyzing the youth’s perceptions related to the specific field and understanding the accuracy of the information that the youth has for a specific field. This can help not only to achieve agricultural sustainability but could also assist in solving the challenges associated with the persistent flat unemployment rate of Japan. Furthermore, this research indicated that contrary to youth perception related to the increased frequency and related losses from climate change-associated typhoons, there has been no significant rise in typhoons over the last 5 years. Moreover, farmers’ perceptions related to late snowfall start time over the past few years can be validated using the albedo data.