At the end of March 2011, a few weeks after the Great East Japan Earthquake, 20 rice farmers affiliated to J-Rap, an agricultural distribution company in Sukagawa, central Fukushima Prefecture, got together to assess the situation.

With no one seeming to have much idea what was really happening or what to expect next, the atmosphere was overwhelmingly gloomy, and many farmers were in despair over the prospects for producing any rice that year.

Heading up their concerns was the then unknown amount of radioactive material that had been and was still being released following explosions and three reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Though winds had no doubt dispersed the contamination across massive swaths of eastern Japan, it seemed only logical to the farmers that their fields just 50 km southwest of the plant would have received a hefty dose — though back then, none of them had heard of iodine-131, cesium-134, cesium-137, microsieverts, becquerels or any of the radiation terminology they would soon grapple with.