Masanobu Fukuoka: Japanese Organic Farmer
(Page 4 of 13)
July/August 1982
By the Mother Earth News staff.
PLOWBOY: And you've been farming ever since?
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FUKUOKA: Almost. During the Second World War, I was sent to work at the Agricultural Experimental Station at Kochi, where I had to fall back upon my scientific training. After the war was over, though, I joyfully returned to the mountains and resumed my life as a farmer.
PLOWBOY: How much land did you start with?
FUKUOKA: After the war there was a massive land reform in Japan—called the Nochi-kaiho—in which large landowners like my father lost most of their holdings. My father died soon after that, and I was left with one small rice paddy about a quarter-acre in size.
PLOWBOY: Did you begin practicing natural farming right away?
FUKUOKA: I had started experimenting in some of my father's mandarin orange orchards even before the war. I believed that — in order to let nature take its course—the trees should grow totally without intervention on my part, so I didn't spray or prune or fertilize . . . I didn't do anything. And, of course, much of the orchard was destroyed by insects and disease.
The problem, you see, was that I hadn't been practicing natural agriculture, but rather what you might call lazy agriculture! I was totally uninvolved, leaving the job entirely to nature and expecting that everything would turn out well in the end. But I was wrong. Those young trees had been domesticated, planted, pruned, and tended by human beings. The trees had been made slaves to humans, so they couldn't survive when the artificial support provided by farmers was suddenly removed.
PLOWBOY: Then successful natural farming is not simply a do-nothing technique?
FUKUOKA: No, it actually involves a process of bringing your mind as closely in line as possible with the natural functioning of the environment. However, you have to be careful: This method does not mean that we should suddenly throw away all the scientific knowledge about horticulture that we already have. That course of action is simply abandonment, because it ignores the cycle of dependence that humans have imposed upon an altered ecosystem. If a farmer does abandon his or her "tame" fields completely to nature, mistakes and destruction are inevitable.
The real path to natural farming requires that a person know what unaltered nature is, so that he or she can instinctively understand what needs to be done—and what must not be done—to work in harmony with its processes.
PLOWBOY: That attitude certainly denies the "manipulate and control" foundation of established modern agriculture. How did you progress from your traditional training to such an unusual concept of farming?
FUKUOKA: During my youth I had seen all the farmers in the village grow rice by transplanting their seedlings into a flooded paddy . . . but I eventually realized that that isn't the way rice grows on its own! So I put aside my knowledge of traditional agricultural methods and simply watched the natural rice cycle. In its wild state, rice matures over the summer. In the autumn the leaves wither, and the plant bends over to drop its seeds onto the earth. After the snow melts in the spring, those seeds germinate, and the cycle begins again. In other words, the rice kernels fall on unplowed soil, sprout, and grow by themselves.
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