The Abuses of Modern Livestock Farming: The storms of agricultural reform are
beginning to ravage the good name of agricultural modernization. Let us look at a trend
that has emerged in all farming technologies.
One new livestock technology that has been spreading like wildfire throughout Japan
is the mass raising of chickens, pigs, cattle, and other livestock and fowl in large
facilities. The animals are fed preserved foods compounded from a very small amount of
natural feed and liberal amounts of additives such as drugs, vitamins, and nutrients, all
ostensibly for protecting health. This eliminates the necessity of rushing about to attend
to every need of the livestock. The animal is efficiently raised by placing it in a narrow
enclosure or cage just big enough to accommodate it but hardly allowing it to move
about. The goal is to produce as much as possible on a narrow piece of land.
There appear to be no problems with this method. In addition to being efficient, the
work is less physically demanding and production is better than ever. But high-volume
livestock farming encounters the problems of market supply and distribution of the
product familiar in factory production. Beset by wildly fluctuating prices, the livestock
farmer becomes totally caught up with concerns over his margins and profits.
The quality of these products is in every way inferior to beef and eggs from cattle and
fowl allowed to roam freely outdoors and to multiply and grow without restraint. What’s
more, because these animals have been raised on roughage packed with antibiotics,
preservatives, flavor enhancers, hormones, and residual pesticides, there is also the
concern that toxins harmful to the human body have accumulated in the beef and eggs.
We have arrived in an age where beef is no longer beef and eggs are no longer truly eggs.
What we have instead is merely the conversion of complete feed preparations into animal
products. Livestock farming is no longer a form of agriculture practiced in nature.
Unfertilized battery chickens are just machines for hatching factory-made eggs, while
hogs and cows are merely factory-produced meat and milk-fabricating machines. These
products could not possibly be wholesome. The point is that, regardless of whether the
product is good or bad, one person can raise tens and hundreds of thousands of head
efficiently with mass production techniques. But it is capital, not men, that today raises
these animals. This is no longer the farmer’s domain, but that of commercial houses
which raise livestock in large factory-like operations.
Natural Grazing is the Ideal: Is natural livestock farming old and outdated in contrast?
Under the precepts of natural farming, livestock farming takes the form of open grazing.
Cattle, pigs, and chickens fattened while free to roam at will on the open land under the
sun’s rays are a precious, irreplaceable source of food for man. The problem lies
elsewhere—in the prejudiced view that sees natural farming as inefficient. Is grazing,
which allows one person to raise hundreds of head without doing anything, really
inefficient? Is it not, rather, the most efficient form of production there is?
This is not to say that raising livestock freely in open meadows and forests is without
its problems. There are poisonous plants, diseases,and ticks. Some would even call free
grazing unhygienic. But most such problems are the consequence of human action and
can be resolved. The basic premise that animals are perfectly capable of being born and
living in nature is unassailable, and so, although solutions may require some very
determined observation, there is always a way. The key is to raise the right animal in the
right environment while letting nature be.
Even fields covered with a thick growth of wild roses and creepers that seem
worthless for grazing can be used to raise goats and sheep, which love to feed on these
intractable shrubs and vines and could clean up the undergrowth in the densest jungle.
There is no need to worry that cows or other animals cannot be raised in uncultivated
pastures. They can be raised in mixed woods or even in mountain forests planted with
Japanese cypress or pine. Grasses and underbrush have to be cut the first seven or eight
years after planting trees on a mountain, but the labor of cutting the brush can be
eliminated very nicely by raising cows. The grazing cattle may slightly damage a few
young saplings along a fixed path through the cypresses, but the planted saplings will
remain almost entirely unaffected. This may seem hard to believe, but it is only natural
when we recall that animals in nature do not indiscriminately ravage anything unrelated
to what they eat. Obviously, a natural forest would be even more ideal than a reforested
area.
In allowing animals to graze in the fields and mountains, -some people may worry
about the presence of poisonous plants, but animal shave an innate ability to tell these
apart from other plants. If no longer able to do so, there is most certainly a reason why.
Bracken, for example, may be a poisonous herb under certain conditions, but it grows in
clusters. If a cow eats too much and suffers, something is probably wrong with the cow.
Livestock bred by artificial insemination and raised on artificial milk formulas are
more likely to have poor viability. Animals improved indiscriminately often show
unanticipated defects. Breeding programs are usually opposed to nature and often result
in the creation of unnaturally deformed creatures that man deludes himself into thinking
are superior.
It would be unreasonable, of course, to take modern, genetically upgraded livestock,
release them suddenly in a forest, and expect to see an immediate improvement in results.
But if the possibilities are studied with patience,a path should open up. At the very least,
after habituating the animals to open grazing in the forests over the course of two or three
generations, natural selection will take over and those animals adapted to nature will
survive.
Ticks and mites do present a problem, but the conditions under which parasites such as
these arise vary considerably. There may be a great number at the southern edge of a
wood, but very few along the northern edge. Infestation is generally limited in cool,
breezy areas, and is closely related to humidity and temperature. The problem can be
prevented by providing the right environment. It should suffice to raise hardier cattle and
give some consideration to the protection and raising of beneficial insects that help
control the tick population.
It will also be necessary to stop thinking in terms of raising just cattle. What happens,
for example, when we let pigs, chickens, and rabbits graze together with the cows in an
orchard? The pigs like to root up the ground looking for the insects and earthworms they
are fond of in valleys and damp areas; they are like small tractors that dig up the soil. Just
sow some clover and grain in the turned soil, and with the cow and pig droppings, you
should get a fine growth of pasturage. Once this pasture grass begins to nourish, then you
should be able to raise chickens, goats, and rabbits in the same way.
Today’s livestock raised in large numbers and reduced to just so much standardized
machinery, no longer receives the strength and grace of nature. As the products of human
endeavor achieved through the power of science alone, they differ fundamentally from
nature—which creates something from nothing—because they are merely processed
goods, the transformation of one thing into another. Livestock production under factory like conditions is generally thought to be efficient, but this is a nearsighted assessment
based on a limited spatial and temporal frame of reference. The pitiful sight of fowl, pigs,
and cattle confined to cages and unable even to move bears witness to the loss of nature
of these animals and points also to man’s alienation to and loss of nature. Both the farm
worker directly engaged in the raising of livestock and the city dweller who consumes
these food products lose their health and humanity as they turn away from nature.
Livestock Farming in the Search for Truth: Scientific farming is content to think of
conditional truth as the truth, but natural farming makes every effort to discard all
premises and conditions and seek out a truth without conditions.
For instance, in order to study a particular animal feed, scientific farming will give
various formulations to cows chained in a barn (representing a certain set of
environmental conditions), and judge the mixture producing the best results to be
superior to the others (inductive experimentation). From this, it draws various
conclusions about cattle feed, which it believes to be the truth.
Natural farming does not follow this type of reasoning and experimental approach.
Because its goal is unconditional truth it begins by examining the cow from a standpoint
that disregards environmental conditions, by asking how the cow lives in open nature.
But it does not immediately analyze what the cow eats when and where. Rather, it takes a
broader perspective and looks at how a cow is born and grows. By paying too much
attention to what the cow feeds on, we lose a broader understanding of how it lives and
what its needs are. More is required to sustain life than just food. Nor are problems of
sustenance resolved by food alone. Many other factors relate to life: weather, climate,
living environment, exercise, sleep, and more. Even-on the subject of food, what a cow
does not eat, dislikes, or has low nutritive value is generally thought worthless, but may
actually be indispensable in certain cases. We must therefore find a way, within the broad
associations between man, livestock, and nature, of rearing animals that leaves them free
and unrestrained.
The very notion of “raising” livestock should not even exist in natural farming. Nature
is the one that raises and grows. Man follows nature; all he needs to know is with what
and in what manner cattle live. When he designs and builds a barn or a chicken coop, a
farmer should not rely on his human reasoning and feelings. Even if the scientist
conducts independent studies on such factors as temperature and ventilation and runs
experiments in which he raises calves or chicks under given conditions, it is only natural
that his results will show that these should be raised under cool conditions in summer and
warm conditions in winter. The conclusion (scientific truth) that an optimum temperature
is needed to raise the calves or chicks is a natural consequence of the method used to
raise these, and certainly is not an immutable truth.
Although high and low temperatures exist in nature,the notions of hot and cold do not.
Although cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, chickens, and ducks all know or cold. “With our
temperate climate in Japan, there never was a need to worry about whether the summer
heat or winter cold was good or bad for raising animals.
Heat and cold exist, and yet do not exist, in nature. One will never be wrong in starting
with the assumption that the temperature and humidity are everywhere and at all times
just right. The size, height, frame, construction, windows, floor, and other features of
animal enclosures have been improved on the basis of diverse theories, but we have to
return to the starting point and try making a fundamental turnabout. Without hot and cold,
the barn is no longer necessary. All that is needed, for the convenience of man, is the
smallest of sheds: perhaps a milking shed for the cows and a tiny chicken shed in which
hens can lay their eggs. As for the animals, they will scratch and forage freely for food
night and day under the open sky, find themselves a place to roost, and grow up strong
and healthy. Disease has become a frequent problem lately in animal husbandry and
because it is often a major factor in determining whether a livestock operation will
succeed or fail, farmers are racking their brains to find a solution. This problem too will
never really be solved unless farmers make their starting point the raising of healthy
animals that do not contract diseases.
Some eighty percent of Japan consists of mountains and valleys. One could probably
fence off the entrance to one of those depopulated mountain villages that have lost their
inhabitants to the cities and thus create a large, open grazing range for animals. I would
like to see someone try an experiment on this scale. All sorts of domestic animals could
be placed inside the enclosure and left to themselves for a number of years, after which
we could go in and see what had happened.
To summarize, then, scientific experiments always take a single subject and apply a
number of variable conditions to it while making some prior assumption about the results.
Natural farming, however, pushes aside all conditions, and knocking away the precepts
from which science operates, strives to find the laws and principles in force at the true
source.
Unchanging truths can be found only through experiments free of conditions,
assumptions, and notions of time and space.
Natural Farming—In Pursuit of Nature
There is a fundamental difference between nature and the doctrine of laissez-faire or
non-intervention. Laissez-faire is the abandoning of nature by man after he has altered it,
such as leaving a pine tree untended after it has been transplanted in a garden and pruned,
or suddenly letting a calf out to pasture in a mountain meadow after raising it on formula
milk.
Crops and domestic animals are no longer things of nature and so it is already close to
impossible to attain true Mahayana natural farming.But at least we can try reaching for
Hinayana natural farming, which approaches closest to nature. The ultimate goal of this
way of natural farming is to know the true spirit and form of nature. To do this, we can
start by closely examining and learning from a laissez-faire situation before us. By
observing nature that has been abandoned by man, we can make out the true form of
nature that lies behind it. Our goal then is to carefully examine abandoned nature and
learn of the true nature revealed when the effects of man’s earlier actions are removed.
But this will not suffice to know nature in its true form. Even nature stripped of all
human action and influence is still only nature as seen through man’s relativity, a nature
clothed in the subjective notions of man. To follow the path of natural farming, one must
tear the robes of human action from nature and remove the innermost garments of
subjectivity.
One must beware also of arbitrarily settling upon causal relationships on the basis of
subjective human notions, or of drawing suppositions on the problems of accident and
necessity or the association between continuity and discontinuity. One must first follow
closely on nature’s heels, rejecting all assumptions, knowledge, and action—not thinking,
not seeing, not doing. That nature is God.
The Only Future for Man
Will humanity go on advancing without end? The people of this world seem to think
that, although reality is rife with contradiction, development will continue forever in a
process of sublation while wandering between right and left, and thesis-antithesis synthesis.
Yet the universe and all it contains does not advance along a linear or planar path. It
expands and grows volumetric ally outward and must, at the furthest limit, rupture, split,
collapse, disappear. But at a point beyond this limit, what should have vanished reverses
its course and reappears, now moving centripetally inward, contracting and condensing.
What has form vaporizes at the limits of development to a void, and the void condenses
into a form and reappears, in a never-ending cycle of contraction and expansion.
I liken this pattern of development to the Wheel of Dharma or a cyclone because it is
identical to a cyclone or tornado, which compresses the atmosphere into a vortex,
expanding and growing as it rages furiously, then eventually disintegrates and vanishes.
Human progress also moves mankind toward collapse. The question is how, and in
what manner, shall this ruin come about? I have sketched below how I believe this will
inevitably occur and what man must do.
The first stage of this collapse will be the breakdown of human knowledge. Human
knowledge is merely discriminating knowledge. Having no way of knowing that this
knowledge is really unknowable, man founders ever deeper into confusion through the
collection and advancement of unknowable and mistaken knowledge. Unable to extricate
himself from schizophrenic development, he ultimately brings upon himself spiritual
derangement and collapse.
The second stage will be the destruction of life and matter. The earth, an organic
synthesis of these two elements, is being broken down and divided up by man. This is
gradually depriving the natural world on the earth’s surface of its equilibrium.
Destruction of the natural order and the natural ecosystem will rob matter and life of their
proper functions. Nor will man be spared. Either he will lose his adaptability to the
natural environment and meet with self-destruction or he will succumb to instant ruin
under a slight pressure from without, like an inflated rubber balloon ruptured by a small
needle.
The third stage will be failure, when man loses sight of what he must do. The
industrial activity that expands relentlessly with developments in the natural sciences is
basically a campaign to promote energy consumption.Its target has not been so much to
boost energy production as to senselessly waste energy. As long as man continues to take
the stance that he is “developing” nature, the materials and resources of the earth will go
on drying up. Burdened by growing self-contradictions, industrial activity will grind to a
halt or undergo unyielding transformations that shall usher in drastic changes in political,
economic, and social institutions.
Self-contradiction is most evident in the decline in energy efficiency. In his fascination
with ever greater sources of energy, man has moved from the heat of the fireplace to
electrical generation with a water wheel to thermal power generation to nuclear power.
But he closes his eyes to the fact that the efficiency of these sources (ratio of total energy
input to total energy output) has worsened exponentially in the same order. Because he
refuses to acknowledge this, internal contradictions to accumulate and will soon
reach explosive levels.
Some scientists believe that if nuclear energy dries up we should then turn to solar
energy or wind power, which are non-polluting and do not engender contradictions. But
these will only continue the decline in energy efficiency and, if anything, will accelerate
the speed at which man heads toward destruction.
Until man notices that scientific truth is not the same as absolute truth and turns his
system of values on its head, he will continue to rush blindly onward toward self destruction. There will then be nothing for him to do except sustain an attitude that
enables him to survive without doing anything. Man’s only work then will consist of the
barest of farming essential for sustaining life. But since agriculture does not exist as an
independent entity of and for itself, the farming he will practice will not be an extension
of modern agriculture.
Farming with small machinery was more energy efficient than modern large-scale
agriculture using large implements, while farming with animal power was even more
efficient. And no form of agriculture has better energy efficiency than natural farming.
Once this becomes clear, people will realize for themselves what they must do.
Only natural farming lies in the future. Natural farming is the only future for man.
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