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If you think commercial vegetables are nature's own, you are in for a big surprise. These vegetables are a watery chemical concoction of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potash, with a little help from the seed. And that is just how they taste. And commercial chicken eggs (you can call them eggs if you like) are nothing more than a mixture of synthetic feed, chemicals, and hormones. This is not a product of nature but a man made synthetic in the shape of an egg. The farmer who produces vegetables and eggs of this kind, I call a manufacturer.

Setting out for a day's work.

Now if it is manufacturing you are talking about, you will have to do some fancy figuring if you want to make a profit. Since the commercial farmer is not making any money, he is like a merchant who cannot handle the abacus. That sort of fellow is regarded as a fool by other people and his profits are soaked up by politicians and salesmen.

In olden times there were warriors, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. Agriculture was said to be closer to the source of things than trade or manufacturing, and the farmer was said to be "the cupbearer of the gods." He was always able to get by somehow or other and have enough to eat.

But now there is all this commotion about making money. Ultra-fashionable produce such as grapes, tomatoes, and melons are being grown. Flowers and fruit are being produced out-of-season in hothouses. Fish breeding has been introduced and cattle are raised because profits are high.

This pattern shows clearly what happens when farming climbs aboard the economic roller coaster. Fluctuations in prices are violent. There are profits, but there are losses as well.

Failure is inevitable. Japanese agriculture has lost sight of its direction and has become unstable. It has strayed away from the basic principles of agriculture and has become a business.

Research for Whose Benefit?

When I first began direct-seeding rice and winter grain, I was planning to harvest with a hand sickle and so I thought it would be more convenient to set the seeds out in regular rows. After many attempts, dabbling about as an amateur, I produced a handmade seeding tool. Thinking that this tool might be of practical use to other farmers, I brought it to the man at the testing center. He told me that since we were in an age of large-sized machinery he could not be bothered with my "contraption."

Next I went to a manufacturer of agricultural equipment. I was told here that such a simple machine, no matter how much you tried to make of it, could not be sold for more than $3.50 apiece. "If we made a gadget like that, the farmers might start thinking they didn't need the tractors we sell for thousands of dollars." He said that nowadays the idea is to invent rice planting machines quickly, sell them head over heels for as long as possible, then introduce something newer. Instead of small tractors, they wanted to change over to larger-sized models, and my device was, to them, a step backward. To meet the demands of the times, resources are poured into furthering useless research, and to this day my patent remains on the shelf.

It is the same with fertilizer and chemicals. Instead of developing fertilizer with the farmer in mind, the emphasis is on developing something new, anything at all, in order to make money. After the technicians leave their jobs at the testing centers, they move right over to work for the large chemical companies.

Recently I was talking with Mr. Asada, a technical official in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and he told me an interesting story. The vegetables grown in hothouses are extremely unsavory. Hearing that the eggplants shipped out in winter have no vitamins and the cucumbers no flavor, he researched the matter and found the reason: certain of the sun's rays could not penetrate the vinyl and glass enclosures in which the vegetables were being grown. His investigation moved over to the lighting system inside the hothouses.

The fundamental question