The One-Straw Revolution_ An Introduction to Natural Farming - Masanobu Fukuoka [1]
The One-Straw Revolution we received as an empowering testament to one person's courage to reject the common wisdom that laboratory, narrowly profit-driven science was the salvation of farming. Instead, Fukuoka taught that the best methods of food cultivation are those aligned with nature, which on a practical level means minimal soil disruption (no tilling or weeding) and no application of chemicals (be they fertilizers or pesticides). Back then, the book fortified a budding movement of back-to-the-landers, but today its message is vastly more pertinent: for while the movement to align farming with nature is burgeoning and has spawned various systems—all generally referred to as "organic"—still dominant and spreading globally is the destructive track. It gains strength from the corporate-propagated argument that without massive petrochemicals and soil disruption, we will certainly starve. As a result, pesticide use per acre has quadrupled since my youth and large-scale, fossil-fuel, corporate-monopoly-dependent farming continues to displace traditional practices worldwide.
Today the dangers of petrochemical agriculture are widely known and about two-thirds of Americans say they've tried "organic" food. Even so, the myth remains that organically raised produce is inevitably more expensive than food produced with the benefit of chemicals and must therefore be a luxury, impractical for the masses. Even many who are deeply engaged in sustainability movements revert to the idea of "lack" or of doing without in order to save the environment. Fukuoka, by contrast, encourages us to trust nature's bounty; in The One-Straw Revolution he describes how his yields rivaled those of neighboring farms that used the dominant technologies of the day. And in recent years his experience has been widely validated: it is estimated that low- or no-till practices are currently being used to farm 250 million acres of land worldwide, and in 2007 a University of Michigan study projected that overall food availability could increase by about half if the whole world moved to ecologically sane farming.
The assumption that confronting scarcity is an immutable fact of human existence, I believe, has led to the paradox we see today: life-stunting overwork and deprivation for the majority alongside life-stunting overwork and surfeit for the minority. So Fukuoka's message is more deeply radical than simply encouraging farmers to forego tilling or spraying; it cuts to the core of our understanding of ourselves and our place on this earth. He assures us that as we come to experience nature's patterns we can let go of our fear of scarcity.
While Fukuoka does have his list of "do nots," The One-Straw Revolution is ultimately about having more not less. Nature can do the work we have unnecessarily taken on ourselves, so what Fukuoka terms "natural farming" is less labor intensive. Successful farming is about realizing more leisure in which to experience the richest of relationships, about living in ways that are "gentle and easy." We can enjoy "sitting back" and even being "lazy," writes Fukuoka. To make his point he tells of visiting ancient temples in which Japanese farmers of a bygone era left Haiku they'd composed during their three months of winter leisure. Today, he notes, farmers' three months of leisure have shrunk to days. There is no time to write poetry.
Fukuoka tells us that truly successful agriculture requires not so much arduous labor as awareness, observation, connection, and persistence. Today's agribusiness companies lure farmers to their products by promising that by applying them to their fields according to fixed, prescribed schedules, without much thought about their unique circumstances, farmers can be sure of reliable profits. This might be termed