Today I would like to talk about Yusandou's agricultural welfare collaboration efforts. We are a small tea farming company that mainly produces tea in Nara, but also in Kyoto and the surrounding areas. Since we established the company in 2016, we have been producing and selling tea using natural cultivation without fertilizers or pesticides, through trial and error. It is a small company started by myself and my sister. From the beginning to the fifth year, our sales increased steadily and we were always busy. From the beginning, I was in charge of the fields, and my sister was in charge of bagging and shipping the tea. We had outsourced the bagging before, but it was a big burden to keep bagging so many teas by myself, so we were contacted by Green Thumb, a welfare facility in Katano City, and we started our agricultural welfare collaboration efforts by outsourcing the bagging to the welfare facility.
Initially, my sister went to the welfare facility to teach them how to pack the bags. Eventually, she began coming in once a week as a Green Thumb staff member. By having us, who are clients, also serve as staff at the facility, communication between staff became smoother, and we ourselves had more opportunities to come into contact with the users, which gave us an opportunity to think about how each user can grow and what kind of work we could do together.
Once they had mastered bagging to a certain extent, we next entrusted them with weeding in the fields. During the busy farming season from May to November, we have the Green Thumb members come in three mornings a week to help with light farm work. At first they were clumsy at weeding the tea fields, but as they did it more and more, they became faster and more careful. We mainly have them weed between the tea rows, but we ask the members who are good at weeding to operate the brush cutter and cut the surrounding areas. We have the young, energetic members help us with the tea harvesting work, so we are trying to increase what they can do.
In 2021, my sister gave birth, so I started working at Green Thumb once a week. It was my first time going to a welfare facility, and I was nervous at first. After a few visits, I got to know the members better and began to understand their backgrounds and what they were thinking. I decided to change my thinking to create work that I could ask them to do, with the aim of raising the level of what everyone can do a little and making it acceptable in society, rather than saying that we can't do it just because we are a welfare facility.
