The One-Straw Revolution_ An Introduction to Natural Farming - Masanobu Fukuoka [43]
Shortly after this episode, I appeared on an NHK television program in a panel discussion with various university professors, and at that time I was again asked, "Why don't you give up growing rye and barley?" I stated once again, very clearly, that I wasn't about to give them up for any one of a dozen good reasons. About that time the slogan for giving up winter grain cultivation called for "A merciful death." That is, the practice of growing winter grain and rice in succession should pass away quietly. But "merciful death" is too gentle a term; the Ministry of Agriculture really wanted it to die in the ditch. When it became clear to me that the main purpose of the program was to promote a rapid end to growing winter grain, leaving it "dead by the side of the road" so to speak, I exploded in indignation.
Forty years ago the call was to grow wheat, to grow foreign grain, to grow a useless and impossible crop. Then it was said that the Japanese varieties of rye and barley did not have as high a food value as American grain and the farmers regretfully gave up growing these traditional grains. As the standard of living rose by leaps and bounds, the word went out to eat meat, eat eggs, drink milk, and change from eating rice to eating bread. Corn, soybeans, and wheat were imported in ever-increasing quantities. American wheat was cheap, so the growing of native rye and barley was abandoned. Japanese agriculture adopted measures which forced farmers to take part-time jobs in town so they could buy the crops they had been told not to grow.
And now, new concern has arisen over the shortage of food resources. Self-sufficiency in rye and barley production is again being advocated. They are saying there will even be subsidies. But it is not enough to grow traditional winter grains for a couple of years and then to abandon them again. A sound agricultural policy must be established. Because the Ministry of Agriculture has no clear idea of what should be grown in the first place, and because it does not understand the connection between what is grown in the fields and the people's diet, a consistent agricultural policy remains an impossibility.
If the Ministry's staff were to go to the mountains and meadows, gather the seven herbs of spring, and the seven herbs of autumn,* and taste them, they would learn what the source of human nourishment is. If they would investigate further they would see that you can live quite well on traditional domestic crops such as rice, barley, rye, buckwheat, and vegetables, and they could decide simply that this is all Japanese agriculture needs to grow. If that is all the farmers have to grow, farming becomes very easy.
Until now the line of thought among modern economists has been that small scale, self-sufficient farming is wrong—that this is a primitive kind of agriculture—one that should be eliminated as quickly as possible. It is being said that the area of each field must be expanded to handle the changeover to large-scale, American-style agriculture. This way of thinking does not apply only to agriculture—developments in all areas are moving in this direction.
The goal is to have only a few people in farming. The agricultural authorities say that fewer people, using large, modern machinery can get greater yields from the same acreage. This is considered agricultural progress. After the War, between 70% and 80% of the people in Japan were farmers. This quickly changed to 50%, then 30%, 20%, and now the figure stands at around 14%. It is the intention of the Ministry of Agriculture to achieve the same level as in Europe and America, keeping less than