Masanobu Fukuoka

Sawing Seeds in the Desert Masanobu Fukuoka

Mr. Fukuoka gathered us to­gether to dis­cuss his phi­los­o­phy. These ses­sions were dif­fi­cult for me. Al­though I could speak Ja­pa­nese flu­ently, I was more flu­ent in the ev­ery­day lan­guage we used around the farm. The philo­soph­i­cal and spir­i­tual ex­pres­sions he used dur­ing these dis­cus­sions were im­pos­si­ble for me to un­der­stand. What made this even more frus­trat­ing was that Mr. Fukuoka told us over and over that the phi­los­o­phy was ev­ery­thing, and the farm­ing was merely an ex­am­ple of the phi­los­o­phy. “If you do not un­der­stand the phi­los­o­phy,” he said, “the rest be­comes empty ac­tiv­ity. Larry Korn

I simply emptied my mind and tried to absorb what I could from nature.

I spent many years of my youth fool­ishly search­ing for some­thing I “should” have been do­ing. In­stead, I should have en­trusted ev­ery­thing to the flow­ers bloom­ing in the meadow. Even if peo­ple do noth­ing at all, the grasses and trees and the song­birds will live on.

I look for­ward to the day when there is no need for sa­cred scrip­tures or su­tras. The drag­on­fly will be the mes­siah.

No mat­ter how much hu­mans search for free­dom from the fear of not know­ing, in the end, they should just re­turn to the re­al­ity of na­ture and live their lives in peace.

The ul­ti­mate goal of the West­ern philoso­phers, who are ex­plor­ing the world of the in­di­vid­ual self, and the re­li­gious peo­ple of the East, who are seek­ing the tran­scen­dent self, is to elu­ci­date the orig­i­nal mind that mys­te­ri­ously oc­curs as part of ex­is­tence it­self. It is only through na­ture that we can see this orig­i­nal mind.
 Any­way, none of these ideas—life, death, spirit, the soul—es­capes the frame­work of rel­a­tive thought. They are noth­ing more than ab­stract no­tions built up of judg­ments and cir­cu­lar rea­son­ing based on hu­man think­ing. Peo­ple have cre­ated a world of ghosts called the here­after. But no mat­ter how much hu­mans search for free­dom from the fear of not know­ing, in the end, they should just re­turn to the re­al­ity of na­ture and live their lives in peace.

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Tran­scen­dent time, or time as it ex­ists in na­ture, is a con­tin­u­ous mo­ment of the present. When one sees and op­er­ates within that time and space, it is the unity of all things that is per­ceived.

If you un­der­stand the spirit of a sin­gle flower, you un­der­stand ev­ery­thing. You un­der­stand that re­li­gion, phi­los­o­phy, and sci­ence are one, and at the same time they are noth­ing at all.

Masanobu Fukuoka excerpts from "The One-Straw Revolution"

Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers.

In making the transition to this kind of farming (natural farming), some weeding, composting or pruning may be necessary at first, but these measures should be gradually reduced each year. Ultimately, it is not the growing technique which is the most important factor, but rather the state of mind of the farmer.

In my opinion, if 100% of the people were farming it would be ideal.

If you plant one grain of rice, it becomes more than one thousand grains. One row of turnips makes enough pickles for the entire winter. If you follow this line of thought, you will have enough to eat, more than enough, without struggling. But if you decide to try to make money instead, you get on board the profit wagon, and it runs away with you.

If natural farming were practiced, a farmer would also have plenty of time for leisure and social activities within the village community.

If a high price is charged for natural food, it means that the merchant is taking excessive profits. Furthermore, if natural foods are expensive, they become luxury foods and only rich people are able to afford them.
 If natural food is to become widely popular, it must be available locally at a reasonable price…

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

Meat and other imported foods are luxuries because they require more energy and resources than the traditional vegetables and grains produced locally. It follows that people who limit themselves to a simple local diet need do less work and use less land than those with an appetite for luxury.

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Extravagance of desire is the fundamental cause which has led the world into its present predicament.
 Fast rather than slow, more rather than less—this flashy „development” is linked directly to society’s impending collapse. It has only served to separate man from nature. Humanity must stop indulging the desire for material possessions and personal gain and move instead toward spiritual awareness.

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

Pure natural farming, by contrast, is the no-stroke school. It goes nowhere and seeks no victory. Putting „doing nothing” into practice is the one thing the farmer should strive to accomplish. Lao Tzu spoke of non-active nature, and I think that if he were a farmer he would certainly practice natural farming. I believe that Gandhi’s way, a methodless method, acting with a non-winning, non-opposing state of mind, is akin to natural farming. When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

Masanobu Fukuoka from „The One-Straw Revolution”

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The One-Straw Revolution Masanobu Fukuoka

It was 1970, and the extent to which our species—supposedly the most intelligent—had failed as steward of the planet had only begun to sink in on me. At age twenty-six, in my first big „ah-ha” moment, I was struck by the realization that we humans had actively created the food scarcity we claimed to fear. We were (and still are) feeding more than a third of the world’s grain to livestock, which return to us only a fraction of those nutrients. I was seized with curiosity—why would any species disrupt the source of its own nourishment, its very survival? The next year I published Diet for a Small Planet. Could food, I wondered in that book and in subsequent writings, be humanity’s pathway to sanity?
 Not many years later, Masanobu Fukuoka’s volume, now in your hands, swept across the West; it spoke directly to many who had come of age in the sixties and who were now eager to move beyond protest to practical solutions. I was one. True, we’d not yet heard of global climate change; but the dangers of chemical farming were becoming evident to many. We wanted to believe there was another way to nourish ourselves.

Readers who expect this to be a book only about farming will be surprised to find that it is also a book about diet, about health, about cultural values, about the limits of human knowledge. Others, led to it by hearsay of its philosophy, will be surprised to find it full of practical knowhow about growing rice and winter grain, citrus fruit, and garden vegetables on a Japanese farm. WENDELL BERRY

The One-Straw Revolution we received as an empowering testament to one person’s courage to reject the common wisdom that laboratory, narrowly profit-driven science was the salvation of farming. Instead, Fukuoka taught that the best methods of food cultivation are those aligned with nature, which on a practical level means minimal soil disruption (no tilling or weeding) and no application of chemicals (be they fertilizers or pesticides). Back then, the book fortified a budding movement of back-to-the-landers, but today its message is vastly more pertinent: for while the movement to align farming with nature is burgeoning and has spawned various systems—all generally referred to as „organic”—still dominant and spreading globally is the destructive track. It gains strength from the corporate-propagated argument that without massive petrochemicals and soil disruption, we will certainly starve. As a result, pesticide use per acre has quadrupled since my youth and large-scale, fossil-fuel, corporate-monopoly-dependent farming continues to displace traditional practices worldwide.

Mr. Fukuoka believes that natural farming proceeds from the spiritual health of the individual. He considers the healing of the land and the purification of the human spirit to be one process, and he proposes a way of life and a way of farming in which this process can take place. LARRY KORN

Today the dangers of petrochemical agriculture are widely known and about two-thirds of Americans say they’ve tried „organic” food. Even so, the myth remains that organically raised produce is inevitably more expensive than food produced with the benefit of chemicals and must therefore be a luxury, impractical for the masses. Even many who are deeply engaged in sustainability movements revert to the idea of „lack” or of doing without in order to save the environment. Fukuoka, by contrast, encourages us to trust nature’s bounty; in The One-Straw Revolution he describes how his yields rivaled those of neighboring farms that used the dominant technologies of the day. And in recent years his experience has been widely validated: it is estimated that low- or no-till practices are currently being used to farm 250 million acres of land worldwide, and in 2007 a University of Michigan study projected that overall food availability could increase by about half if the whole world moved to ecologically sane farming.

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The assumption that confronting scarcity is an immutable fact of human existence, I believe, has led to the paradox we see today: life-stunting overwork and deprivation for the majority alongside life-stunting overwork and surfeit for the minority. So Fukuoka’s message is more deeply radical than simply encouraging farmers to forego tilling or spraying; it cuts to the core of our understanding of ourselves and our place on this earth. He assures us that as we come to experience nature’s patterns we can let go of our fear of scarcity. Czytaj dalej

True Nature revealed Masanobu Fukuoka

I felt that I understood just one thing. Without my thinking about them, words came from my mouth: „In this world there is nothing at all… „I felt that I understood nothing. I could see that all the concepts to which I had been clinging, the very notion of existence itself, were empty fabrications. My spirit became light and clear. I was dancing wildly for joy. I could hear the small birds chirping in the trees, and see the distant waves glistening in the rising sun. The leaves danced green and sparkling. I felt that this was truly heaven on earth. Everything that had possessed me, all the agonies, disappeared like dreams and illusions, and something one might call „true nature” stood revealed. […]
 Despite the change, I remained at root an average, foolish man, and there has been no change in this from then to the present time. Seen from the outside, there is no more run-of-the-mill fellow than I, and there has been nothing extraordinary about my daily life. But the assurance that I know this one thing has not changed since that time. I have spent thirty years, forty years, testing whether or not I have been mistaken, reflecting as I went along, but not once have I found evidence to oppose my conviction.
Masanobu Fukuoka from „The One-Straw Revolution”

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Masanobu Fukuoka from "The One-Straw Revolution"

…humanity is ignorant, that there is nothing to strive for, and that whatever is done is wasted effort… There is no one so great as the one who does not try to accomplish anything.

To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the center. At the same time, a centripetal effect asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises. But if people merely become caught up in reacting, moving to the left or to the right, depending on conditions, the result is only more activity. The non-moving point of origin, which lies outside the realm of relativity, is passed over, unnoticed. I believe that even „returning-to-nature” and anti-pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the overdevelopment of the present age.
Masanobu Fukuoka from „The One-Straw Revolution”

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