Tokachi day, a day of interaction with the locals

During my visit to Hokkaido earlier this year, we had a “Tokachi Day” organised by our agency, basically it’s a day of interaction with the local farmers in Hokkaido. To be frank, it sounds quite uninteresting to me at first, until I get to experience it…

First we arrive to an asparagus farm for some hands-on asparagus picking… – We got a whole row of asparagus for ourself~! It’s a beautiful day in a beautiful landscape. 🙂 – The owner of the farm demonstrate how to pick an asparagus and how to choose a good one, by the way, he own 80 hectare of farmland… for those who doesn’t know, you have 10000 square meters in 1 hectare, that’s a lot of lands~! – Kaley also get to try to pick an asparagus too, although she’s not very good at it.. – You can actually eat them right out of the soil… And I gotta tell you, I cannot believe how sweet raw asparagus taste when I first bite it~! – Our little helper, hehe… – After picking, the asparagus are boil or stirfry… – just asparagus and lightly salted, very tasty~! 🙂

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Next we head to another farmland… – And hop on to a tractor ride around his farm… – That’s the owner of this farm, all 100 hectare of them, manage mostly by himself and his wife, a very humble guy. This potato farm you see here? It can produce 300 tons of potato in a single harvest~! And just one potato itself is enough for a bag of Calbee potato chips, can you imagine how many bags of chips over here? Must be very good money… – He show us his wheat farm too, that’s his son on the left. He’s there to help out on weekends only. – The owner proudly mention that these farming equipments are made in Germany, I guess no one can beat the germans in engineering… – We bought some tasty burdock tea from him.. very nice~! 🙂

These farmers are very rich people themselves, looking at the big cars, big houses and huge lands they own, one must be wondering why would they need this extra income from organising these activities with tourist like us? The answers is, they are not doing it for the money…They know and believe how good Hokkaido produces are and now they want the world to taste them. And trust me, the asparagus and potatoes I had that day is definitely the best I’ve eaten. From what you know, they might be the answers to kids who don’t eat their vegetables~! 😀

Jokes aside, I really had an enjoyable time, and I really do hope farm produces from Hokkaido really do come to our locals markets one day~! 😉

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