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MASANOBU FUKUOKA (1913–2008) was born and raised on the Japanese island of Shikoku. He was the oldest son of a rice farmer who was also the local mayor. Fukuoka studied plant pathology and worked for three years as a produce inspector in the customs office in Yokohama. But in 1938 he returned to his village home determined to put his ideas about natural farming into practice. During World War II, he worked for the Japanese government as a researcher on food production, managing to avoid military service until the final few months of the war. After the war, he returned to his birthplace to devote himself wholeheartedly to farming. And in 1975, distressed by the effects of Japan's post-war modernization, Fukuoka wrote The One-Straw Revolution. In his later years, Fukuoka was involved with several projects to reduce desertification throughout the world. He remained an active farmer until well into his eighties, and continued to give lectures until only a few years before his death at the age of ninety-five. Fukuoka is also the author of The Natural Way of Farming and The Road Back to Nature. In 1988 he received the Magsaysay Award for Public Service.

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ is author or co-author of sixteen books, including Diet for a Small Planet and Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad. She has co-founded three organizations, including the Institute for Food and Development Policy and, more recently, the Small Planet Institute, which she leads with her daughter Anna Lappé. In 1987, she received the Right Livelihood Award, also called the "Alternative Nobel." She has received seventeen honorary doctorates and has been a visiting scholar at MIT.

THE ONE-STRAW REVOLUTION

An Introduction to Natural Farming

MASANOBU FUKUOKA

Edited by

LARRY KORN

Preface by

WENDELL BERRY

Introduction by

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ

New York Review Books

New York

Contents

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

Preface

Editor's Introduction

Notes on the Translation

I

Look at this Grain

Nothing at All

Returning to the Country

Toward a Do-Nothing Farming

Returning to the Source

One Reason Natural Farming Has Not Spread

Humanity Does Not Know Nature

II

Four Principles of Natural Farming

Farming Among the Weeds

Farming with Straw

Growing Rice in a Dry Field

Orchard Trees

Orchard Earth

Growing Vegetables like Wild Plants

The Terms for Abandoning Chemicals

Limits of the Scientific Method

III

One Farmer Speaks Out

A Modest Solution to a Difficult Problem

The Fruit of Hard Times

The Marketing of Natural Food

Commercial Agriculture Will Fail

Research for Whose Benefit?

What is Human Food?

A Merciful Death for Barley

Simply Serve Nature and All is Well

Various Schools of Natural Farming

IV

Confusion About Food

Nature's Food Mandala

The Culture of Food

Living by Bread Alone

Summing up Diet

Food and Farming

V

Foolishness Comes Out Looking Smart

Who is the Fool?

I Was Born to Go to Nursery School

Drifting Clouds and the Illusion of Science

The Theory of Relativity

A Village Without War and Peace

The One-Straw Revolution

To My Readers

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

It was 1970, and the extent to which our species—supposedly the most intelligent—had failed as steward of the planet had only begun to sink in on me. At age twenty-six, in my first big "ah-ha" moment, I was struck by the realization that we humans had actively created the food scarcity we claimed to fear. We were (and still are) feeding more than a third of the world's grain to livestock, which return to us only a fraction of those nutrients. I was seized with curiosity—why would any species disrupt the source of its own nourishment, its very survival? The next year I published Diet for a Small Planet. Could food, I wondered in that book and in subsequent writings, be humanity's pathway to sanity?

Not many years later, Masanobu Fukuoka's volume, now in your hands, swept across the West; it spoke directly to many who had come of age in the sixties and who were now eager to move