Kaminopporo, suburb of Sapporo

Even in the 1920s, roughly 50 years after the establishment of the Hokkaido Development Commission and Sapporo Agricultural College, based on the idea that dairy farming offered more stable production than field farming or rice farming, which were more directly and severely affected by cold damage and poor harvests, the Hokkaido Dairy Sales Association was established in Kaminoppro, a suburb of Sapporo, in 1925, exactly 100 years ago.

Mitsugi Sato, an engineer at the association and a graduate of Hokkaido University’s Faculty of Agriculture, began making butter alone, using a hand-cranked churn (butter-making machine). This site later became a training center for modern dairy farming techniques and one of the centers for the development of dairy farming technology in Japan. Mitsugi Sato later became the first president of Snow Brand Milk Products and also served as president of Rakuno Gakuen University (Dairy agriculture University).