January centered on the quieter, new-year kind of work — harvesting daikon, putting together lucky bags, roasting hojicha, and year-end tax adjustments. Even amid the busyness of my sister being away on maternity leave, it looked like a new staff member would join us starting in April, and I felt real hope for a business that was slowly, steadily filling out. Around this time I started holding up "a farming school" as an ongoing goal.

February was a month of moving on two fronts — desk work and fieldwork — with a study session on the web and accounting, updating the sales system for the SNN Kansai office, hosting a farming-experience camp, shipping overseas, roasting hojicha, and a stall at the Guriguri Marché. I got through what might have been the hardest stretch since I started farming, and along the way I finally got to join the young producers' camp I'd been hoping to attend for so long. Around this time, new visions for the future started coming up — a farm inn, pottery, beekeeping, sake brewing.

March marked the start of the busy season, with pruning, harvesting and making bancha, hosting Kansai J2 members, raising summer-vegetable seedlings, and preparing dry-field rice seedbeds. With my sister on childcare leave, I was handling every task alone, but half a year in, I was starting to feel that I really could run the business by myself. This month we also began hosting J2 (the young farmers' group), creating chances for people and consumers from other regions to enjoy our tea.

In April, at an evening online meeting for young producers, we exchanged information on the theme of "this year's rice-growing," and moved forward with sowing rice seed, preparing for the tea harvest, hosting J2, preparing seedbeds, and tilling the paddies.

The labor shortage that had been a long-standing problem finally, calmly resolved itself, thanks to closer ties with a welfare facility and more working days from our staff. Users of the welfare facility began taking on tea-picking work with real enthusiasm, and our two university student part-timers also started stepping into "seeder" (youth group) roles. Counting the welfare facility members, the people connected to Yusando's work grew into a big family of more than 20.

May was a busy month typical of the growing season — weeding the tea fields, transplanting seedlings, preparing fields, sowing rice seed, weeding, harvesting tea (sencha, black tea, matcha), tea-making, hosting Kansai J2, and running a black tea workshop. Akiko Tsuda formally joined Yusando as staff, and her bright personality quickly put her to good use. The support-worker role at the welfare facility Green Thumb also became something the three of us — myself, my sister, and Tsuda — shared, which deepened our relationships with each of the people we work with there. This year's tea grew wonderfully, giving us our best result yet in our eighth year.

June, with black tea production, tea harvesting, tea garden maintenance, and rice transplanting, brought the peak of the busy season. Young colleagues in their twenties started joining the work, and the tea harvest, which used to take a small handful of us, could now be finished quickly and enjoyably with more than ten people. The family that had supported our natural cultivation went through a major health scare, and I'm grateful we managed to keep the work going regardless.

July continued with weeding and replanting the rice paddies and harvesting tea. This year, a family member's hospitalization, preparing for a birth, and my sister's childcare leave all overlapped — my own limits were tested, but looking back, getting through it made me much stronger.

Our branding project with a designer and photographer based in the United States also reached a turning point, and I could feel the whole company beginning to take on a new shape.

August was a relatively calm summer of weeding, cutting grass, sorting inventory, and cleaning the old farmhouse. It was also the month a family member who'd had a serious health scare had a successful surgery and started to recover. Since I'd substantially rethought our work systems this year, being able to properly rest over the summer gave me the energy and stamina to keep up the pace through the second half without slowing down.

September brought a magazine interview, sowing daikon seed, harvesting loofah, weeding the tea fields, and pulling barnyard grass from the paddies. On September 4th, our fourth child, Dozaburo, was born. After the birth, I focused on housework and childcare while our whole family built a new daily rhythm together.

October brought the rice harvest, weeding the tea garden, paperwork for organic JAS, thinning the daikon, and gathering loofah water — the harvest work of autumn moved steadily forward. A month after our fourth child's birth, we'd gotten a little more used to sharing housework and childcare. My sister's childcare leave also ended, and she began returning to work. It was a year of huge trials — running the company alone, and running the household alone too — but I've come to feel it made me much stronger for it. New goals were also voiced this year: publishing a book, building a café and direct-sales shop, and setting up a koji-making facility.

November brought harvesting daikon, autumn pruning, weeding, harvesting soybeans, and paperwork for the organic JAS application. The family member who'd had surgery was about 80% recovered, and my wife, having finished her postpartum rest, was back to daily life — a sense of ordinary rhythm returning to the household. Looking back before turning 40, I feel I passed through a major turning point.

December brought the organic JAS on-site inspection, introducing a stone mill for matcha, threshing soybeans, and harvesting daikon — the work that wraps up the whole year. Our very first year, we prepared for the organic JAS inspection through sleepless nights; this time, our systems had come far enough that it took only about an hour to prepare, and the inspector even praised our cultivation management and ties with the local community.

At the same time, changes in my family's situation made it harder to ask for help with childcare or farm work as I used to, and with four young children to raise, I felt real pressure carrying everything alone, from field management to finances. And then a new goal was added: "next year, I want to make sake."