vi: In Focus
Natural farming as a way of being Patrick M. Lydon and Suhee Kang
"It is not about the technique", Larry Korn tells me from across the room. We are in his office at his home in Oregon, and I am admiring the books lining the walls. There are titles by M. Kat Anderson, Bill Mollison, Wendell Berry, and of course, Masanobu Fukuoka. Larry gestures to the shelves, "The answer is not in the books. Not a one of them. It's not in the technique, it's in the view." Larry lived on Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farm in the 1970s and would later bring this Japanese farmer's ideas to the world through the translation of bestselling books like The One Straw Revolution. As Larry told me that day— and reminded me during later meetings in Berkeley, in Santa Cruz, and in Osaka — Fukuoka's natural farming may have helped make seed bombing, cover cropping, and non-tillage hip, but natural farming was never really about these things. At its core, natural farming is a re-discovery of our human ability to develop deeply meaningful relationships with the Earth. In this way, natural farming shares common roots with many world religions, wisdom traditions, animistic cultures, and the ecological mindsets of indigenous peoples spanning many thousands of years and as many corners of this Earth. Even in my home state of California, Larry reminded me, there were around a hundred indigenous tribes who could be called natural farmers. They might not all have been throwing seed balls as Fukuoka did, but they had mastered an awareness and relationship with the environment, and they used it to grow food and dwell in a non-extractive relationship with that environment. Our modern society has largely written off such ways of living, and Masanobu Fukuoka— the man who brought natural farming into the world's lexicon —had something of a rough ride trying to re-ignite these ways of seeing. In the 1930s, Fukuoka was a plant pathologist at the government agricultural disease research facility in Yokohama, Japan. He spent his days looking at nature through a microscope, dissecting it into pieces, categorizing and separating this part of nature from that. Fukuoka understood that science was incredibly useful for taking nature apart but, ultimately, he was more curious about how it all came together. Fukuoka saw this coming together as the true wisdom of nature. Whilst science might not be able to reveal this wisdom in its entirety, he reasoned, perhaps a personal practice of working together with nature could. These thoughts eventually led him to quit his job as a researcher, and to spend the rest of his life finding ways to reveal nature's wisdom.
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