The One-Straw Revolution_ An Introduction to Natural Farming - Masanobu Fukuoka [5]
In the area of Shikoku where Mr. Fukuoka lives, rice is grown on the coastal plains and citrus on the surrounding hillsides. Mr. Fukuoka's farm consists of one and a quarter acres of rice fields and twelve and a half acres of mandarin orange orchards. This may not seem like much to a Western farmer, but because all the work is done with the traditional Japanese hand tools, it requires a lot of labor to maintain even so small an acreage.
Mr. Fukuoka works with the students in the fields and in the orchard, but no one knows exactly when he will visit the job site. He seems to have a knack for appearing at times when the students least expect him. He is an energetic man, always chattering about one thing or another. Sometimes he calls the students together to discuss the work they are doing, often pointing out ways in which the job could be accomplished more easily and quickly. At other times he talks about the life cycle of a weed or disease fungus in the orchard, and occasionally he pauses to recall and reflect upon his farming experiences. Besides explaining his techniques, Mr. Fukuoka also teaches the fundamental skills of agriculture. He emphasizes the importance of caring properly for tools and never tires of demonstrating their usefulness.
If the newcomer expected "natural farming" to mean that nature would farm while he sat and watched, Mr. Fukuoka soon taught him that there was a great deal he had to know and do. Strictly speaking, the only "natural" farming is hunting and gathering. Raising agricultural crops is a cultural innovation which requires knowledge and persistent effort. The fundamental distinction is that Mr. Fukuoka farms by cooperating with nature rather than trying to "improve" upon nature by conquest.
Many visitors come to spend only an afternoon, and Mr. Fukuoka patiently shows them around his farm. It is not uncommon to see him striding up the mountain path with a group of ten or fifteen visitors puffing behind. There have not always been so many visitors, however. For years, while he was developing his method, Mr. Fukuoka had little contact with anyone outside his village.
As a young man, Mr. Fukuoka left his rural home and travelled to Yokohama to pursue a career as a microbiologist. He became a specialist in plant diseases and worked for some years in a laboratory as an agricultural customs inspector. It was at that time, while still a young man of twenty-five, that Mr. Fukuoka experienced the realization which was to form the basis of his life's work and which was to be the theme of this book, The One-Straw Revolution. He left his job and returned to his native village to test the soundness of his ideas by applying them in his own fields.
The basic idea came to him one day as he happened to pass an old field which had been left unused and unplowed for many years. There he saw healthy rice seedlings sprouting through a tangle of grasses and weeds. From that time on, he stopped flooding his field in order to grow rice. He stopped sowing rice seed in the spring and, instead, put the seed out in the autumn, sowing it directly onto the surface of the field when it would naturally have fallen to the ground. Instead of plowing the soil to get rid of weeds, he learned to control them by a more or less permanent ground cover of white clover and a mulch of rice and barley straw. Once he has seen to it that conditions have been tilted in favor of his crops, Mr. Fukuoka interferes as little as possible with the plant and animal communities in his fields.