Fukuoka starts this little gem of a book with a seemingly harsh remark by saying: “Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.” But after flying through the book, I tend to agree with him. He advocates a “do-nothing” type of farming which is not to say his style was idle or easy. But rather, it calls for doing less with the end result that nothing is out of sync with nature.

Generally Fukuoka was also a bit harsh in his evaluation of the medical and educational systems, and especially of scientists. He was a scientist himself before he devoted his life to natural farming and he draws an analogy between the role of the scientist in society to the role of discrimination in our minds which leads to narrow-mindedness. He discusses how technology based on science only serves to take us away from nature.

But Fukuoka advocates a gentle calm way of life and farming practice with four underlying principles, namely: no cultivation, no chemical fertilizer of prepared compost, no weeding by tillage or herbicides, and no dependence on chemicals. He points out that fertility increases when nature is left to itself and that this is beyond the reach of our imagination. He shares his simple techniques that allowed him to produce the same or greater quantities of crops as his neighbours who used the modern industrial methods, one of which was the use of strewing straw on his fields.

Fukuoka not only focuses on farming methods, but covers a wide range of related issues including diet, nutrition, the culture of food, confusion about food, the agri-food business and agricultural policy.  He calls for sweeping changes to the economic and social structures of our societies, which if there is, will be because of a change in consciousness in people.

Drawing from philosophy and religion, he has many sayings that reflect this and I give a few here:

“If you try to do something, your efforts will never achieve the desired result. (There is no other way than through the destruction of the ego, casting aside the thought that humans exist apart from heaven and earth.)

Trying to capture the unknowable in theories and formalized doctrines is like trying to catch the wind in a butterfly net.

An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing.

There are countless variations. (Nature is always changing and is never the same.)

In general, commercial agriculture is an unstable proposition.

Food is life, and life must not step away from nature.

Human beings can destroy natural forms, but they cannot create them.

What’s wrong with a growth rate of 0%?

Living is no more than the result of being born.

Just to live here and now – this is the true basis of human life.

To believe that by research and invention humanity can create something better than nature is an illusion.

Farming used to be sacred work.

The marriage is not bestowed, not received; the perfect pair comes into existence of itself.

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

No matter how hard people try, they cannot improve upon naturally grown fruits and vegetables.

If we do have a food crisis it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature’s productive power, but by the extravagance of human desire.

In all contentions there is neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad.

Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. (Let food be your medicine.)

Within one thing lie all things, but if all things are brought together not one thing can arise. (Western science is unable to grasp this precept of eastern philosophy.  A person can analyze and investigate a butterfly as far as he likes, but he cannot make a butterfly. In an apple there are all kinds of nutrients, fibre, juice, calories, and other things.  If we were to try to make an apple by putting all the known components together, we would not be able to make an apple.)

Masanobu Fukuoka trained as a microbiologist and worked as a soil scientist specializing in plant pathology. After suffering an illness at 25, he had an enlightenment experience and decided to put his thoughts into practice. He returned to his family’s farm on the island of Shikoku in Southern Japan to practice natural farming. He died at the age of 95 in 2008.

The book is available on Amazon and in pdf form here. More information can also be found on the One Straw Revolution website.

About the reviewer

JENNIE WILSON has been involved in the banking and legal industries. However, since June 2010, she has caught up her  long-term interests of health and environmental matters and manages a blog called B’org Food Chain, “Big organisation of Food and the Chain of inequities” with the view to writing a book on similar issues.

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The Earth has witnessed 5 great extinctions in the last half a billion years. We are now on the brink of the 6th great extinction. We lose a distinct species, of one sort or another, every ten minutes. The normal “background rate of extinction” is roughly 1-2 species per year. That rate is between 100 and 1000 times faster than the background rate of species extinction. This one is unique as the scale of extinction we’re seeing now is mainly due to the activities of a single species, namely us.

Terry Glavin takes us on a personal odyssey as he “journeys among the Lost and Left Behind” worlds. He gives a vivid and poignant account of the scale of loss of species, and the way it affects our lives. On a grander scale, he laments not only the extinction of species, but the dying of languages and cultures, that accompany such losses.

I was pleasantly surprised at the attention he gave to Singapore, as an entire chapter was devoted to this island state and how it represents the paradox of having destroyed most of its rainforests. 95% of Singapore was covered by primary rainforests till the mid 1800s. Now only a fraction of 1%  of that remains, having been replaced by a mass of urban construction.

At the same time, this is the place where through the efforts of the Singapore Zoo, we are seeing a kind of “Noah’s Ark” with a large collection of the “living dead.”  Species like the Bali mynah, pygmy hippo, the proboscis monkey, the orangutans, that are nurtured in enclosed spaces, which otherwise are more or less certain of dying out as a species in their native habitats, as those very same habitats are being decimated rapidly.

I was particularly saddened by his account of the ecological disaster in Russia….a country that I know very little about, let alone seen it. Yet, I could feel the pangs of pain, because when you care about the planet as a whole, political demarcations matter little…Nature, its diversity and its inhabitants belong to all of us.

Glavin takes us to Khabarovsk (I had to look it up in the Atlas, it’s on the Far Eastern side of Russia closer to the border with China) where he recounts the story of how the privatisation of the Soviet Union led to forest licences falling into criminal hands, plundering forests for mineral deposits and leading to the collapse of fisheries. The 200 year old Forest Service was abolished, with the Ministry of Natural resources becoming the main conduit for plundering the Far East’s natural wealth. Since the 1990s, the Amur river in Russia has lost 90% of its salmon species. In other parts of  Russia, more than 90% of the world’s saiga antelope have disappeared from the Russian steppes and the plains of Kazhakstan.

It’s not just the genetic diversity of animal species that we are losing, but plant species too, particularly of food crops. Glavin dwells in the chapter on “An Apple is a Kind of Rose” not on exotic species in exotic lands, but on the humble apples and potatoes and our every day food crops.

According to research on food crop extinctions by Rural Advancement Fund International (RAFI), 86% of the 7098 apple varieties in America have disappeared. Out of 357 onion varieties, only 27 remain. Of 307 sweet-corn varieities, only 12 remain, and so is the fate of cabbages, radishes, lettuces, watermelons and other domesticated crops.

Throughout the 20th century, we are losing a variety of subspecies of domesticated vegetables and fruits to a few industrial hybrid varieties with long shelf lives, that are actively promoted by large companies. About 75 % of all global food production now come from only a dozen crops and only a few species of those crops.

Despite the gloomy discoveries, Glavin finds hope in many places. I was encouraged by his fascinating journey to Costa Rica, one of the few countries in the world which has gone to great lengths to maintain its tropical rainforests and its ecological heritage, symbolised by the amazing humming birds and the resplendent Quetzal.

Glavin found hope in the vaults of the Royal Kew Garden, where seeds of several plant species are caringly preserved for research and for posterity. So too does he find hope in remote North Eastern corner of India, in a village called Khonoma, where the tribal communities don’t resort to the centuries old habit of slash and burn agriculture, but a technique called pollarding, to encourage the tree to produce new growth on a regular basis in order to maintain a supply of new wood for various purposes.

If we are to be a living, breathing world, rich in diversity and abundance of life, then as Glavin puts it, we “have to take the helm” and allow for such diversity to flourish. It will be hard work, he acknowledges, but “you do what can, everything you can”

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Does extinction of species really matter?

I’ve met a few people to whom losing the giant panda in China, or the orangutans in Borneo, or the “unknown and undiscovered” creepy crawlies on the forest floor of a tropical rainforest, or a fish species in the ocean deep, don’t really matter..after all, species extinction is a routine part and parcel of evolution. Agreed, but what is unprecedented in the 3 ½ billion years of so of evolution is the rapidity of the rate of extinction, almost entirely due to human activities, and this rapidity of extinction is bound to have repercussions.

Interdependence of species

Species are interdependent in many ways and don’t live in isolation. An extreme form of vulnerability is a one-to-one dependency, where one species is entirely and exclusively dependent on the other for survival .

Can you recognise this? This is a fruiting fig tree. There are about 800 species of fig trees all over the world, but what is an absolute ecological marvel is that each species of fig tree is pollinated by a unique species of wasp, tiny ones about 2mm only!  If for some reason, the species of wasp, or the fig tree species were to be affected, the other dependant species would also disappear.

Nature abounds in such interdependencies, and if any one species disappears, it causes a chain reaction in which other species of animals, birds, insects and plants are also affected. When such links are cut, eventually ecosystems collapse, and humans who are dependent on them for food, for fibre and products will also be severely affected.

Biodiversity holds immense pharmaceutical interests, and this is one of the main economic reasons why it is so important. Only 1% of the rainforests have been studied. As someone said, losing biodiversity is like burning down an ancient library after reading only 1% of the books.

What is the value of Biodiversity and Nature’s services?

This is a really interesting concept because we know the value of economic goods, or for example, a country’s output of goods and services.  Like many things of genuine value to society, like happiness, a homemaker’s contribution to the family, or for the wonderful services that Nature provides, there is no economic value.

However, Costanza et al in 1997 impute an economic value of all of Nature’s services and it worked out to be US $33 trillion per year, much more than the value of the gross national products of all nations at the time of US $18 trillion. That really tells us something, doesn’t it!
Dr. Gretchen Daily in her famous study lists the following “ecosystem services” which contribute to to human welfare:
• purification of air and water
• mitigation of floods and droughts
• detoxification and decomposition of wastes
• generation and renewal of soil and fertility
• pollination of crops and natural vegetation
• control of the vast majority of potential agricultural pests
• dispersal of seeds and translocation of nutrients
• sources of crop varieties, medicines and industrial enterprise
• protection from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays
• partial stabilization of  climate
• moderation of temperature extremes and the force of wind and waves
• support of diverse human cultures
• provision of aesthetic beauty and intellectual stimulation that lift the human spirit
To this list we could add an important function in an era of global warming, the “storage of carbon” as ecosystems remove carbon from the atmosphere, release oxygen, and store carbon in biomass (such as wood)

Extinction isn’t just a loss for science and scientists; it’s a real loss for all of us. Yet wittingly or unwittingly, we are steadily impoverishing a rich and varied form of life with our economic activities.  What a dull and monotonous world it would be indeed,  if all we had left to show of the planet to our descendants were a few predictable species of plant and animals in monoculture plantations and animal farms, craftily selected by us humans to serve our need and greed…a planet with no surprises, nothing left to discover and marvel.

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