Introduction
Anyone Can Be a Quarter-Acre Farmer
In this hilltop orchard overlooking the Inland Sea stand several mud-walled huts.
Here, young people from the cities—some from other lands—live a crude, simple life
growing crops. They live self-sufficiently on a diet of brown rice and vegetables, without
electricity or running water. These young fugitives, disaffected with the cities or religion,
tread through my fields clad only in a loincloth. The search for the bluebird of happiness
brings them to my farm in one corner of lyo-shi in Ehime Prefecture, where they learn
how to become quarter-acre farmers.
Chickens run free through the orchard and semi-wild vegetables grow in the clover
among the trees.
In the paddy fields spread out below on the Dogo Plain, one no longer sees the
pastoral green of barley and the blossoms of rape and clover from another age. Instead,
desolate fields lie fallow, the crumbling bundles of straw portraying the chaos of modern
farming practices and the confusion in the hearts of farmers.
Only my field lies covered in the fresh green of winter grain*. (*Barley or wheat.
Barley cultivation is predominant in Japan, but most of what I say about barley in this
book applies equally well to wheat.)
This field has not been plowed or turned in over thirty years. Nor have I applied
chemical fertilizers or prepared compost, or sprayed pesticides or other chemicals. I
practice what I call “do-nothing” farming here, yet each year I harvest close to 22 bushels
(1,300 pounds) of winter grain and 22 bushels of rice per quarter-acre. My goal is to
eventually take in 33 bushels per quarter-acre.
Growing grain in this way is very easy and straightforward. I simply broadcast clover
and winter grain over the ripening heads of rice before the fall harvest. Later, I harvest
the rice while treading on the young shoots of winter grain. After leaving the rice to dry
for three days, I thresh it then scatter the straw uncut over the entire field. If I have some
chicken droppings on hand, I scatter this over the straw. Next, I form clay pellets
containing seed rice and scatter the pellets over the straw before the New Year. With the
winter grain growing and the rice seed sown, there is now nothing left to do until the
harvesting of the winter grain. The labor of one or two people is more than enough to
grow crops on a quarter-acre.
In late May, while harvesting the winter grain, I notice the clover growing luxuriantly
at my feet and the small shoots that have emerged from the rice seed in the clay pellets.
After harvesting, drying, and threshing the winter grain, I scatter all of the straw uncut
over the field. I then flood the field for four to five days to weaken the clover and give the
rice shoots a chance to break through the cover of clover. In June and July, I leave the
field un irrigated, and in August I run water through the drainage ditches once every week
or ten days.
That is essentially all there is to the method of natural farming I call “direct-seeded,
no-tillage, winter grain/rice succession in a clover cover.”
Were I to say that all my method of farming boils down to is the symbiosis of rice and
barley or wheat in clover, I would probably be reproached: “If that’s all there is to
growing rice, then farmers wouldn’t be out there working so hard in their fields.” Yet,
that is all there is to it. Indeed, with this method I haveconsistently gotten better-than average yields. Such being the case, the only conclusion possible is that there must be
something drastically wrong with farming practices that require so much unnecessary
labor.
Scientists are always saying, “Let’s try this, let’s try that.” Agriculture becomes swept
up in all of this fiddling around; new methods requiring additional expenditures and
effort by farmers are constantly introduced, along with new pesticides and fertilizers. As
for me, I have taken the opposite tack. I eliminate unnecessary practices, expenditures,
and labor by telling myself, “I don’t need to do this, I don’t need to do that.” After thirty
years at it, I have managed to reduce my labor to essentially just sowing seed and
spreading straw. Human effort is unnecessary because nature, not man, grows the rice
and wheat.
If you stop and think about it, every time someone says “this is useful,” “that has
value,” or “one ought to do such-and-such,” it is because man has created the
preconditions that give this whatever-it-is its value. We create situations in which,
without something we never needed in the first place, we are lost. And to get ourselves
out of such a predicament, we make what appear to be new discoveries, which we then
herald as progress.
Flood a field with water, stir it up with a plow and the ground will set as hard as
plaster. If the soil dies and hardens, then it must be plowed each year to soften it. All we
are doing is creating the conditions that make a plow useful, then rejoicing at the utility
of our tool. No plant on the face of the earth is so weak as to germinate only in plowed
soil. Man has no need to plow and turn the earth, for microorganisms and small animals
act as nature’s tillers.
By killing the soil with plow and chemical fertilizer, and rotting the roots through
prolonged summer flooding, farmers create weak, diseased rice plants that require the
nutritive boost of chemical fertilizers and the protection of pesticides. Healthy rice plants
have no need for the plow or chemicals. And compost does not have to be prepared if rice
straw is applied to the fields half a year before the rice is sown.
Soil enriches itself year in and year out without man having to lift a finger. On the
other hand, pesticides ruin the soil and create a pollution problem. Shrines in Japanese
villages are often surrounded by a grove of tall trees. These trees were not grown with the
aid of nutrition science, nor were they protected by plant ecology. Saved from the axe
and saw by the shrine deity, they grew into large trees of their own accord.
Properly speaking, nature is neither living nor dead. Nor is it small or large, weak or
strong, feeble or thriving. It is those who believe only in science who call an insect either
a pest or a predator and cry out that nature is a violent world of relativity and
contradiction in which the strong feed on the weak.Notions of right and wrong, good and
bad, are alien to nature. These are only distinctions invented by man. Nature maintained a
great harmony without such notions, and brought forth the grasses and trees without the
“helping” hand of man.
The living and holistic bio system that is nature cannot be dissected or resolved into its
parts. Once broken down, it dies. Or rather, those who break off a piece of nature lay hold
of something that is dead, and, unaware that what they are examining is no longer what
they think it to be, claim to understand nature. Man commits a grave error when he
collects data and findings piecemeal on a dead and fragmented nature and claims to
“know,” “use,” or “conquer” nature. Because he starts off with misconceptions about
nature and takes the wrong approach to understanding it, regardless of how rational his
thinking, everything winds up all wrong. We must become aware of the insignificance of
human knowledge and activity, and begin by grasping their uselessness and futility.
Follow the Workings of Nature
We often speak of “producing food,” but farmers do not produce the food of life. Only
nature has the power to produce something from nothing. Farmers merely assist nature.
Modern agriculture is just another processing industry that uses oil energy in the form
of fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery to manufacture synthetic food products which are
poor imitations of natural food. The farmer today has become a hired hand of
industrialized society. He tries without success to make money at farming with synthetic
chemicals, a feat that would tax even the powers of the Thousand-Handed Goddess of
Mercy. It is no surprise then that he is spinning around like a top.
Natural farming, the true and original form of agriculture, is the method less method of
nature, the unmoving way of Bodhidharma. Although appearing fragile and vulnerable, it
is potent for it brings victory unfought; it is a Buddhist way of farming that is boundless
and yielding, and leaves the soil, the plants, and the insects to themselves.
As I walk through the paddy field, spiders and frogs scramble about, locusts jump up,
and droves of dragonflies hover overhead. Whenever a large outbreak of leaf hoppers
occurs, the spiders multiply too, without fail. Although the yield of this field varies from
year to year, there are generally about 250 heads of grain per square yard. With an
average of 200 grains per head, this gives a harvest of some 33 bushels for every quarter acre. Those who see the sturdy heads of rice rising from the field marvel at the strength
and vigor of the plants and their large yields. No matter that there are insect pests here.
As long as their natural enemies are also present, a natural balance asserts itself.
Because it is founded upon principles derived from a fundamental view of nature,
natural farming remains current and applicable in any age. Although ancient, it is also
forever new. Of course, such a way of natural farming must be able to weather the
criticism of science. The question of greatest concern is whether this “green philosophy”
and way of farming has the power to criticize science and guide man onto the road back
to nature.
The Illusions of Modern Scientific Farming
With the growing popularity of natural foods lately, 1 thought that natural
farming too would be studied at last by scientists and receives the attention it
is due. Alas, I was wrong. Although some research is being conducted on
natural farming, most of it remains strictly within the scope of scientific
agriculture as practiced to date. This research adopts the basic framework of
natural farming, but makes not the slightest reduction in the use of chemical
fertilizers and pesticides; even the equipment used has gotten larger and
larger.
Why do things turn out this way? Because scientists believe that, by
adding technical know-how to natural farming, which already reaps over 22
bushels of rice per quarter acre, they will develop an even better method of
cultivation and higher yields. Although such reasoning appears to make
sense, one cannot ignore the basic contradiction it entails. Until the day that
people understand what is meant by “doing nothing”—the ultimate goal of
natural farming, they will not relinquish their faith in the omnipotence of
science.
When we compare natural farming and scientific farming graphically, we
can right away appreciate the differences between the two methods. The
objective of natural farming is non-action and a return to nature; it is
centrifugal and convergent. On the other hand, scientific farming breaks
away from nature with the expansion of human wants and desires; it is
centripetal and divergent. Because this outward expansion cannot be
stopped, scientific farming is doomed to extinction. The addition of new
technology only makes it more complex and diversified, generating ever increasing expense and labor. In contrast, not only is natural farming simple,
it is also economical and labor-saving.
Why is it that, even when the advantages are so clear and irrefutable, man
is unable to walk away from scientific agriculture?People think, no doubt,
that “doing nothing” is defeatist, that it hurts production and productivity.
Yet, does natural farming harm productivity? Far from it. In fact, if we base
our figures on the efficiency of energy used in production, natural farming
turns out to be the most productive method of farming there is.
Natural farming produces 130 pounds of rice—or 200,000 kilo calories of
energy —per man-day of labor, without the input of any outside materials.
This is about 100 times the daily intake of 2,000 kilo calories by a farmer on
a natural diet. Ten times as much energy was expended in traditional
farming, which used horses and oxen to plow the fields. The energy input in
calories was doubled again with the advent of small-scale mechanization,
and doubled yet another time with the shift to large-scale mechanization.
This geometric progression has given us the energy-intensive agricultural
methods of today.
The claim is often made that mechanization has increased the efficiency
of work, but farmers must use the extra hours away from their fields to earn
outside income to help pay for their equipment. All they have done is
exchange their work in the fields for a job in some company; they have
traded the joy of working outdoors in the open fields for dreary hours of
labor shut up inside a factory.
People believe that modern agriculture can both improve productivity and
increase yields. What a misconception. The truth of the matter is that the
yields provided by scientific farming are smaller than the yields attainable
under the full powers of nature. High-yield practices and scientific methods
of increasing production are thought to have given us increased yields that
exceed the natural productivity of the land, but this is not so. These are
merely endeavors by man to artificially restore full productivity after he has
hamstrung nature so that it cannot exercise its full powers. Man creates
adverse conditions, then rejoices later at his “conquest” of nature. High-yield
technologies are no more than glorified attempts to stave off reductions in
productivity.
Nor is science a match for nature in terms of the quality of the food it
helps to create. Ever since man deluded himself into thinking that nature can
be understood by being broken down and analyzed, scientific farming has
produced artificial, deformed food. Modern agriculture has created nothing
from nature. Rather, by making quantitative and qualitative changes in
certain aspects of nature, it has managed only to fabricate synthetic food
products that are crude, expensive, and further alienate man from nature.
Humanity has left the bosom of nature and recently begun to view with
growing alarm its plight as orphan of the universe.Yet, even when he tries
returning to nature, man finds that he no longer knows what nature is, and
that, moreover, he has destroyed and forever lost the nature he seeks to
return to.
Scientists envision domed cities of the future in which enormous heaters,
air conditioners, and ventilators will provide comfortable living conditions
throughout the year. They dream of building underground cities and colonies
on the seafloor. But the city dweller is dying; he has forgotten the bright rays
of the sun, the green fields, the plants and animals, and the sensation of a
gentle breeze on the skin. Man can live a true life only with nature.
Natural farming is a Buddhist way of farming that originates in the
philosophy of “Mu,” or nothingness, and returns to a “do-nothing” nature.
The young people living in my orchard carry with them the hope of someday
resolving the great problems of our world that cannot be solved by science
and reason. Mere dreams perhaps, but these hold the key to the future.
Anyone Can Be a Quarter-Acre Farmer
In this hilltop orchard overlooking the Inland Sea stand several mud-walled huts.
Here, young people from the cities—some from other lands—live a crude, simple life
growing crops. They live self-sufficiently on a diet of brown rice and vegetables, without
electricity or running water. These young fugitives, disaffected with the cities or religion,
tread through my fields clad only in a loincloth. The search for the bluebird of happiness
brings them to my farm in one corner of lyo-shi in Ehime Prefecture, where they learn
how to become quarter-acre farmers.
Chickens run free through the orchard and semi-wild vegetables grow in the clover
among the trees.
In the paddy fields spread out below on the Dogo Plain, one no longer sees the
pastoral green of barley and the blossoms of rape and clover from another age. Instead,
desolate fields lie fallow, the crumbling bundles of straw portraying the chaos of modern
farming practices and the confusion in the hearts of farmers.
Only my field lies covered in the fresh green of winter grain*. (*Barley or wheat.
Barley cultivation is predominant in Japan, but most of what I say about barley in this
book applies equally well to wheat.)
This field has not been plowed or turned in over thirty years. Nor have I applied
chemical fertilizers or prepared compost, or sprayed pesticides or other chemicals. I
practice what I call “do-nothing” farming here, yet each year I harvest close to 22 bushels
(1,300 pounds) of winter grain and 22 bushels of rice per quarter-acre. My goal is to
eventually take in 33 bushels per quarter-acre.
Growing grain in this way is very easy and straightforward. I simply broadcast clover
and winter grain over the ripening heads of rice before the fall harvest. Later, I harvest
the rice while treading on the young shoots of winter grain. After leaving the rice to dry
for three days, I thresh it then scatter the straw uncut over the entire field. If I have some
chicken droppings on hand, I scatter this over the straw. Next, I form clay pellets
containing seed rice and scatter the pellets over the straw before the New Year. With the
winter grain growing and the rice seed sown, there is now nothing left to do until the
harvesting of the winter grain. The labor of one or two people is more than enough to
grow crops on a quarter-acre.
In late May, while harvesting the winter grain, I notice the clover growing luxuriantly
at my feet and the small shoots that have emerged from the rice seed in the clay pellets.
After harvesting, drying, and threshing the winter grain, I scatter all of the straw uncut
over the field. I then flood the field for four to five days to weaken the clover and give the
rice shoots a chance to break through the cover of clover. In June and July, I leave the
field un irrigated, and in August I run water through the drainage ditches once every week
or ten days.
That is essentially all there is to the method of natural farming I call “direct-seeded,
no-tillage, winter grain/rice succession in a clover cover.”
Were I to say that all my method of farming boils down to is the symbiosis of rice and
barley or wheat in clover, I would probably be reproached: “If that’s all there is to
growing rice, then farmers wouldn’t be out there working so hard in their fields.” Yet,
that is all there is to it. Indeed, with this method I haveconsistently gotten better-than average yields. Such being the case, the only conclusion possible is that there must be
something drastically wrong with farming practices that require so much unnecessary
labor.
Scientists are always saying, “Let’s try this, let’s try that.” Agriculture becomes swept
up in all of this fiddling around; new methods requiring additional expenditures and
effort by farmers are constantly introduced, along with new pesticides and fertilizers. As
for me, I have taken the opposite tack. I eliminate unnecessary practices, expenditures,
and labor by telling myself, “I don’t need to do this, I don’t need to do that.” After thirty
years at it, I have managed to reduce my labor to essentially just sowing seed and
spreading straw. Human effort is unnecessary because nature, not man, grows the rice
and wheat.
If you stop and think about it, every time someone says “this is useful,” “that has
value,” or “one ought to do such-and-such,” it is because man has created the
preconditions that give this whatever-it-is its value. We create situations in which,
without something we never needed in the first place, we are lost. And to get ourselves
out of such a predicament, we make what appear to be new discoveries, which we then
herald as progress.
Flood a field with water, stir it up with a plow and the ground will set as hard as
plaster. If the soil dies and hardens, then it must be plowed each year to soften it. All we
are doing is creating the conditions that make a plow useful, then rejoicing at the utility
of our tool. No plant on the face of the earth is so weak as to germinate only in plowed
soil. Man has no need to plow and turn the earth, for microorganisms and small animals
act as nature’s tillers.
By killing the soil with plow and chemical fertilizer, and rotting the roots through
prolonged summer flooding, farmers create weak, diseased rice plants that require the
nutritive boost of chemical fertilizers and the protection of pesticides. Healthy rice plants
have no need for the plow or chemicals. And compost does not have to be prepared if rice
straw is applied to the fields half a year before the rice is sown.
Soil enriches itself year in and year out without man having to lift a finger. On the
other hand, pesticides ruin the soil and create a pollution problem. Shrines in Japanese
villages are often surrounded by a grove of tall trees. These trees were not grown with the
aid of nutrition science, nor were they protected by plant ecology. Saved from the axe
and saw by the shrine deity, they grew into large trees of their own accord.
Properly speaking, nature is neither living nor dead. Nor is it small or large, weak or
strong, feeble or thriving. It is those who believe only in science who call an insect either
a pest or a predator and cry out that nature is a violent world of relativity and
contradiction in which the strong feed on the weak.Notions of right and wrong, good and
bad, are alien to nature. These are only distinctions invented by man. Nature maintained a
great harmony without such notions, and brought forth the grasses and trees without the
“helping” hand of man.
The living and holistic bio system that is nature cannot be dissected or resolved into its
parts. Once broken down, it dies. Or rather, those who break off a piece of nature lay hold
of something that is dead, and, unaware that what they are examining is no longer what
they think it to be, claim to understand nature. Man commits a grave error when he
collects data and findings piecemeal on a dead and fragmented nature and claims to
“know,” “use,” or “conquer” nature. Because he starts off with misconceptions about
nature and takes the wrong approach to understanding it, regardless of how rational his
thinking, everything winds up all wrong. We must become aware of the insignificance of
human knowledge and activity, and begin by grasping their uselessness and futility.
Follow the Workings of Nature
We often speak of “producing food,” but farmers do not produce the food of life. Only
nature has the power to produce something from nothing. Farmers merely assist nature.
Modern agriculture is just another processing industry that uses oil energy in the form
of fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery to manufacture synthetic food products which are
poor imitations of natural food. The farmer today has become a hired hand of
industrialized society. He tries without success to make money at farming with synthetic
chemicals, a feat that would tax even the powers of the Thousand-Handed Goddess of
Mercy. It is no surprise then that he is spinning around like a top.
Natural farming, the true and original form of agriculture, is the method less method of
nature, the unmoving way of Bodhidharma. Although appearing fragile and vulnerable, it
is potent for it brings victory unfought; it is a Buddhist way of farming that is boundless
and yielding, and leaves the soil, the plants, and the insects to themselves.
As I walk through the paddy field, spiders and frogs scramble about, locusts jump up,
and droves of dragonflies hover overhead. Whenever a large outbreak of leaf hoppers
occurs, the spiders multiply too, without fail. Although the yield of this field varies from
year to year, there are generally about 250 heads of grain per square yard. With an
average of 200 grains per head, this gives a harvest of some 33 bushels for every quarter acre. Those who see the sturdy heads of rice rising from the field marvel at the strength
and vigor of the plants and their large yields. No matter that there are insect pests here.
As long as their natural enemies are also present, a natural balance asserts itself.
Because it is founded upon principles derived from a fundamental view of nature,
natural farming remains current and applicable in any age. Although ancient, it is also
forever new. Of course, such a way of natural farming must be able to weather the
criticism of science. The question of greatest concern is whether this “green philosophy”
and way of farming has the power to criticize science and guide man onto the road back
to nature.
The Illusions of Modern Scientific Farming
With the growing popularity of natural foods lately, 1 thought that natural
farming too would be studied at last by scientists and receives the attention it
is due. Alas, I was wrong. Although some research is being conducted on
natural farming, most of it remains strictly within the scope of scientific
agriculture as practiced to date. This research adopts the basic framework of
natural farming, but makes not the slightest reduction in the use of chemical
fertilizers and pesticides; even the equipment used has gotten larger and
larger.
Why do things turn out this way? Because scientists believe that, by
adding technical know-how to natural farming, which already reaps over 22
bushels of rice per quarter acre, they will develop an even better method of
cultivation and higher yields. Although such reasoning appears to make
sense, one cannot ignore the basic contradiction it entails. Until the day that
people understand what is meant by “doing nothing”—the ultimate goal of
natural farming, they will not relinquish their faith in the omnipotence of
science.
When we compare natural farming and scientific farming graphically, we
can right away appreciate the differences between the two methods. The
objective of natural farming is non-action and a return to nature; it is
centrifugal and convergent. On the other hand, scientific farming breaks
away from nature with the expansion of human wants and desires; it is
centripetal and divergent. Because this outward expansion cannot be
stopped, scientific farming is doomed to extinction. The addition of new
technology only makes it more complex and diversified, generating ever increasing expense and labor. In contrast, not only is natural farming simple,
it is also economical and labor-saving.
Why is it that, even when the advantages are so clear and irrefutable, man
is unable to walk away from scientific agriculture?People think, no doubt,
that “doing nothing” is defeatist, that it hurts production and productivity.
Yet, does natural farming harm productivity? Far from it. In fact, if we base
our figures on the efficiency of energy used in production, natural farming
turns out to be the most productive method of farming there is.
Natural farming produces 130 pounds of rice—or 200,000 kilo calories of
energy —per man-day of labor, without the input of any outside materials.
This is about 100 times the daily intake of 2,000 kilo calories by a farmer on
a natural diet. Ten times as much energy was expended in traditional
farming, which used horses and oxen to plow the fields. The energy input in
calories was doubled again with the advent of small-scale mechanization,
and doubled yet another time with the shift to large-scale mechanization.
This geometric progression has given us the energy-intensive agricultural
methods of today.
The claim is often made that mechanization has increased the efficiency
of work, but farmers must use the extra hours away from their fields to earn
outside income to help pay for their equipment. All they have done is
exchange their work in the fields for a job in some company; they have
traded the joy of working outdoors in the open fields for dreary hours of
labor shut up inside a factory.
People believe that modern agriculture can both improve productivity and
increase yields. What a misconception. The truth of the matter is that the
yields provided by scientific farming are smaller than the yields attainable
under the full powers of nature. High-yield practices and scientific methods
of increasing production are thought to have given us increased yields that
exceed the natural productivity of the land, but this is not so. These are
merely endeavors by man to artificially restore full productivity after he has
hamstrung nature so that it cannot exercise its full powers. Man creates
adverse conditions, then rejoices later at his “conquest” of nature. High-yield
technologies are no more than glorified attempts to stave off reductions in
productivity.
Nor is science a match for nature in terms of the quality of the food it
helps to create. Ever since man deluded himself into thinking that nature can
be understood by being broken down and analyzed, scientific farming has
produced artificial, deformed food. Modern agriculture has created nothing
from nature. Rather, by making quantitative and qualitative changes in
certain aspects of nature, it has managed only to fabricate synthetic food
products that are crude, expensive, and further alienate man from nature.
Humanity has left the bosom of nature and recently begun to view with
growing alarm its plight as orphan of the universe.Yet, even when he tries
returning to nature, man finds that he no longer knows what nature is, and
that, moreover, he has destroyed and forever lost the nature he seeks to
return to.
Scientists envision domed cities of the future in which enormous heaters,
air conditioners, and ventilators will provide comfortable living conditions
throughout the year. They dream of building underground cities and colonies
on the seafloor. But the city dweller is dying; he has forgotten the bright rays
of the sun, the green fields, the plants and animals, and the sensation of a
gentle breeze on the skin. Man can live a true life only with nature.
Natural farming is a Buddhist way of farming that originates in the
philosophy of “Mu,” or nothingness, and returns to a “do-nothing” nature.
The young people living in my orchard carry with them the hope of someday
resolving the great problems of our world that cannot be solved by science
and reason. Mere dreams perhaps, but these hold the key to the future.
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