The One-Straw Revolution_ An Introduction to Natural Farming - Masanobu Fukuoka [2]
Fukuoka also implies that our fixation on control over nature has led us to assume visual order—the straight, weeded rows of uniform fields—is superior farming. If something appears random, we assume it's wrong. It doesn't match our learned aesthetic. But as we come to experience nature as complex patterns of relationships of which we ourselves are part—patterns having nothing to do with the human, visually ordered world—he suggests that we can come to see beneath appearances. Might we, like Fukuoka, find beauty in what we before perceived as distressingly random and untidy?
In a 1982 interview with Mother Earth News, Fukuoka said that "the real path to natural farming requires that a person know what unadulterated nature is, so that he or she can instinctively understand what needs to be done—and what must not be done—to work in harmony with its processes."
So my wish is that the reissue and rediscovery of this little, hopeful, almost playful book will help us in the twenty-first century shed our fear of lack, fear that has fueled the drive for control over nature through formulaic answers. My wish is that Fukuoka's insights live on, perhaps more potent now, as part of an ecology of liberation, not only of the earth but of our fear-clutched psyches as well.
—FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ
Preface
Readers who expect this to be a book only about farming will be surprised to find that it is also a book about diet, about health, about cultural values, about the limits of human knowledge. Others, led to it by hearsay of its philosophy, will be surprised to find it full of practical knowhow about growing rice and winter grain, citrus fruit, and garden vegetables on a Japanese farm.
It is exactly because of such habitual expectations—because we have learned to expect people to be specialists and books to have only one subject—that we are in need of The One-Straw Revolution. This book is valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical. It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture because it is not just about agriculture.
Knowledgeable readers will be aware that Mr. Fukuoka's techniques will not be directly applicable to most American farms. But it would be a mistake to assume that the practical passages of this book are worthless to us for that reason. They deserve our attention because they provide an excellent example of what can be done when land, climate, and crops are studied with fresh interest, clear eyes, and the right kind of concern. They are valuable to us also because they are suggestive and inspiring. Any farmer who reads them will find his thoughts lured repeatedly from the page to his own fields, and from there, making connections, to the entire system of American agriculture.
Like many in this country, and sooner than most, Mr. Fukuoka has understood that we cannot isolate one aspect of life from another. When we change the way we grow our food, we change our food, we change society, we change our values. And so this book is about paying attention to relationships, to causes and effects, and it is about being responsible for what one knows.
Those who are familiar with the literature of organic farming will see the similarities between Mr. Fukuoka's career and that of Sir Albert Howard, the founder of the science of organic agriculture in the West. Like Howard, Mr. Fukuoka started as a laboratory scientist, and, like him, soon saw the limitations of the laboratory. Howard moved his work from the laboratory to the farm, and so changed his life, when he realized that responsibility required him to take his own advice before offering it to other people. Mr. Fukuoka determined his own course in the same way: "Eventually I decided to give my thoughts a form, to put them