Kumamoto Farmer Hunters - Local farmers’ action for saving biodiversity and local community in Southwestern Japan.

In 2016, Kumamoto Farmer Hunters were established by 2 local young farmers, Masahito Miyagawa and Tatsuya Inaba, to tackle with issues caused by increasing wild bores. Although in the beginning, they had no skills or knowledge about wildlife management like other farmers, they created a community to learn how to manage wildlife by themselves. The community grows very fast and exceed 100 farmer members. They shared experience and knowledge with each other to improve countermeasures. This bottom-up approach moved local public bodies, academics, and tech company started to support with their expertise and technologies. For example, Rakuten, a Japanese tech company supported them by providing AI based solution to make wildlife monitoring easier and efficient. To make this initiative sustainable, from the beginning, they utilized e-commerce platform to mobilize resources. They utilized cloud funding to purchase facilities required for defend farmlands from wild boars, Also, with an E-commerce platform called “Rakuten Ichiba”, they sells boar meat and fruits saved by this initiatives, to their supporter and general consumer across Japan.