As the global financial crisis sinks Japan into its worst recession since World War II and hundreds of thousands of jobs are slashed in factories and offices, farming has emerged as a promising new career track. “Agriculture Will Save Japan,” blared a headline for a business weekly magazine. Farmer’s Kitchen, a popular new Tokyo restaurant, plasters its walls with posters of hunky farmers who supply the eatery with organic vegetables.

Seeing agriculture as one of the few industries that could generate jobs right now, the government has earmarked $10 million to send 900 people to job-training programs in farming, forestry and fishing. Japan’s unemployment rate was 4.4% in February, up from 3.9% a year earlier, but still lower than the U.S. or Europe. Some economists expect the figure to rise to a record 8% or so within the next couple of years.

Policy makers are hoping newly unemployed young people will help revive Japan’s dwindling farming population, where two in three full-time farmers are 65 or older. Of Japan’s total population, 6% work in agriculture, most doing so only part time, down from about 20% three decades ago.

Solution to Japan’s Jobless Problem: Send City Workers Back to the Land

Population fan-out is a simple concept: when life prospects or quality are better in the country than the city, the supposedly irreversible flow of population from the country/villages to the city simply reverses, and people go back to the land.

For some reason this seems to be hard for people to grasp: population flow to the cities can go the other way. The people just sell and go. In China, it’s not a genteel trickle of government subsidies farmers, it’s half the population of the United Kingdom picking up and going back home.

You’re going to hear a lot more about this kind of thing over the next few years. As life in the cities gets harder, and supply chain complexity begins to get really, really expensive, food prices will rise, and the stability of farming will begin to make more sense to people, particularly if you factor in Ivette Perfecto’s work on organic agriculture, do high intensity biodynamic or similar approaches like SPIN farming. Farming happens! #collapsonomics