Silver Spoon is the big popular farming anime right now and in the shadows is the less popular ecchi farming anime Nourin. While it may seem that there is no reason to watch Nourin it does have its own niche that becomes more apparent later on.
Nourin does a good job of making fun of some food fads and itself in the episode about selling moe products. Getting people to buy food based off of a moe character on the package is a real thing and Nourin was the right kind of show to make fun of the idea. It does make me wonder if there isn’t some food product trying to cater to fujoshi. The episode also poked fun at the illustrator of Nourin which was amusing and it is pretty great when shows like this make fun of themselves.
From Moe Eggs to Moeshroom. Where would it go from here?
There is also an episode in Nourin where the school has to get rid of their crops and soil because of southern blight. This is also a real thing that farmers have to deal with, but there are different ways to deal with it like pesticides and having the soil heat to a temperature that will kill the fungus. Since the school farm does not appear to use a lot of chemicals getting rid of the soil was probably their only option. Seeing the group having to deal with that was touching.
The kids in Nourin also bring up having to treat the land when it has been overworked to make it fertile once more. Between this and the southern blight it feels like the ecchi is partially there to be the comic relief between telling some of the harsh realities of being a farmer. While the farmers get the joy of having people enjoy their food they also have to see their work destroyed in many ways which Nourin shows and I have not even talked about all of them.
Nourin is not always a serious show and if you do not like ecchi then there is no reason to watch it. If you are fine with it Nourin does have some merit along the way and shows more of the problems with farming that farmers have to overcome along with poking fun of certain things about the industry. It isn’t quite the feel good farming show that Silver Spoon has been, but Nourin shows things that will most likely not appear in that show giving another look at what it is like to farm for a living.
