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.

Fukuoka's first charge was as the caretaker of his father' s Mandarin (Citrus reticulata) orchard. To let nature reveal its wisdom here, he decided to do nothing— to stop pruning, to stop caring for the trees. But the miraculous natural farm of Fukuoka's dreams did not appear. Instead, two hundred trees died. In fact, the experiment nearly wiped out his father's entire orchard. 'It was not natural farming; it was abandonment', wrote Fukuoka about the experience. In this was an important lesson, that natural farming was not just about walking away and letting nature do its thing. There must be another critical ingredient.

The persistent Fukuoka then spent several decades developing his own way of natural farming. In the end, he did tend a successful natural citrus orchard without pruning and with a wild vegetable garden in the understory. He also developed a practice for naturally farmed Rice (Oryza sativa) and winter grains. Along the way, he discovered the missing ingredient of his early failed experiments was to understand our life and the life in the field— plant, animal, fungal, mineral and all —as part of one and the same nature. There is no separation, no discrimination, no hierarchy. In other words, natural farming could not only be concerned with the cultivation of food, but must embrace the cultivation of an equitable relationship between ourselves and the rest of nature.

Ancient Taoist literature suggests that when one views the world in an egoless state of 'no mind', there is no separation between the individual and the totality of existence. Here, in this state of 'no mind', says Fukuoka, is where we can find the 'true form of nature'. In natural farming, then, the relationship that we seek with nature has less to do with our rational minds, and more to do with what lies beyond. Ultimately, Fukuoka's quest for natural farming was not a mission to make farms more productive, or more lucrative, or better, but simply a way of expressing the truth that he saw in nature and, by relation, in himself. Yet, what may come across as a highly spiritual practice also happened to bring results that were both socially and ecologically beneficial.

Fukuoka farmed without modern technology. He used no tractors, no pesticides, no herbicides, and no chemical fertilisers. He purchased nothing from the agricultural industry— with the possible exception of a hoe and a sickle. What seems miraculous, even today, is that although Fukuoka rejected the agricultural 'wisdom' of his time, he consistently produced as much, or more, Rice per bushel as his neighbours, even though these neighbours had the so-called advantages of the latest machinery, fertilisers, seeds, and chemicals. All the nourishment for his crops came from the nature where his farm was located. The resiliency and yield of these crops have been well noted, but not all farms are Fukuoka's. Many farmers who have tried to copy his techniques have failed. Some contend that natural farming is not replicable. Or perhaps, that natural farming only works in one corner of Ehime prefecture on the Japanese island of Shikoku. There is both truth and falsehood in this statement. To understand why, I want to relate our own first encounters with natural farmers.

In the summer of 2011, Suhee and I set out on a four-year journey to produce a film about natural farming called Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness. For me, the first year in Japan and Korea was spent trying to pin down and describe what was going on. I had come from a career in design and technical writing in Silicon Valley, so it seemed clear to me that everything could be reduced to an easy-to-follow process. As a result, though my first meetings with natural farmers and their fields were miraculous, they were also absurd and confusing. I couldn't seem to hold to any collection of facts that would allow me to make rational sense of what they were doing on the farms. 'There must be a magic way a sickle is used,' I thought. Or, 'there should be a certain way to flick your wrist just right when distributing seed.' Or maybe, 'it must be about the timing, or the rains, the moon, or the 24-term calendar.' In those first years, my mistake was in looking at natural farming as a set of processes and techniques. Certainly, learning natural farming can require long years of practice. Certainly, there are techniques each individual develops in this practice. But, as Larry would later tell me in his office, natural farming was not in the technique, but in the awareness and the view.

The view that Fukuoka practised, is the view from inside nature. This contrasts with our more typical perspective, of ourselves as human spectators standing on the outside of nature. Natural farming, then, is a practice of mastering awareness, but not an awareness gained by simply observing the quantifiable, of measuring statistics. A natural farming awareness is one that comes by engaging in a relationship with nature to the point where we realise fully that we are nature. Quantifiable data, as we know it, does not really exist in this relationship. Nothing but this relationship is capable of truly teaching us natural farming. It took me years to realise that the skills from my technical writing career were not wholly useful here. Without the book of instructions, one can still figure out natural farming. Without a functional relationship with nature however, we are hopelessly lost. The real instruction manual is in the wild plants. It is in the soil. It is in the wind, and rain, and sun. The lessons are different every day, changing as surely as nature is always moving and changing. The prerequisite class is learning to pay attention to this nature in each moment, and realising this nature is you.

one can still figure out natural farming. Without a functional relationship with nature however, we are hopelessly lost. The real instruction manual is in the wild plants. It is in the soil. It is in the wind, and rain, and sun. The lessons are different every day, changing as surely as nature is always moving and changing. The prerequisite class is learning to pay attention to this nature in each moment, and realising this nature is you.

Can we feed the world with natural farming? Would not the agricultural industry collapse? Maybe. But in a way, maybe it needs to. We might reverse the question: is our current, global, capitalist-run, environmentally exploitative way of producing food realistic? To this there is a simple answer: there is no way for any system of production to continue if it consistently takes more resources from the Earth than can be replaced. Today, both science and natural farming practice agree on this point. The way we currently grow food is absolutely unrealistic. No amount of technology or innovation can ever reconcile the biological fact that no farm can continue to feed the planet if it is based on extraction and pollution instead of regeneration of the Earth's habitats and resources. The proper question then becomes: how do we move towards more regenerative ways of farming and of living that enable all forms of life to thrive? Many researchers— not to mention many practising farmers —believe that the answer to this question lies in developing a cultural-ecological understanding akin to that of natural farming. Again, a huge part of this is a mindset, a way of approaching the world, of accepting that conditions and techniques will vary widely between different places and cultures. Traditional ecological knowledge and agroecological research have much cultural wisdom to offer us in terms of locally-aware sustainable farming.

There is no set of natural farming techniques which would be applicable to every person or every place, but there are a few principles that nature tends to reveal to us. The following four general principles recur in natural farming practices around the world:

* There is no need to till the field

* Bugs and weeds are not the enemies

* There is no need for external inputs of any kind into your farm

* Nature ultimately decides what grows, not you

These basic principles are expanded upon by Kawaguchi Yoshikazu in our film (Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness), as well as in multiple publications by Fukuoka and Larry (see references and further reading given below). At the same time, however, these should not be understood as an authoritative set of natural farming rules. Indeed, for natural farming to be true, there can be no such thing. Larry often reminded us that the goal of natural farming was 'to become partners again with other forms of life.' From this view, natural farming expands beyond the concept of growing food. It becomes a way of figuring out how to live a life that regenerates our own health, the health of society, and the health of the environment around us, no matter what we do for a living.

Natural farming understands that everything in nature has its own role. This means that the farmer must also get to know and perform their own part. This is what makes natural farming such an extremely personal, creative, and exciting endeavour for human beings. Every day worked with this mindset offers a chance to expand our relationship with this Earth, to develop our own unique voice, our skill, our craft as human beings, and to discover more about our role as part of this miraculous Earth. All of that, while simultaneously healing the planet and growing amazingly delicious food.

Yet even without a farm or garden, you can take the first steps towards a natural farming practice right now. You can start, as Fukuoka did, by simply going into nature— any little piece of nature. Start by practicing your awareness, building a relationship, and following what you find in the process.

Images

Courtesy of P. Lydon and S. Kang

References and further reading

Altieri, M.A. (2004) 'Linking ecologists and traditional farmers in the search for sustainable agriculture' , in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2:35-42

Anderson, M.K. (2013) Tending the Wild. University of California Press: Berkeley

Fukuoka, M. (1975) The One Straw Revolution. NYBR Classics: New York

Fukuoka, M. (1985) The Natural Way of Farming. Japan Publications: Tokyo

Korn, L. (2015) One Straw Revolutionary. Chelsea Green: Hartford

Kawaguchi, Y. (2016) Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness. Film. Directed by P. Lydon and S. Kang. SocieCity: San Francisco

Lydon, P.M. (2012) 'Masanobu Fukuoka and Natural Farming.' Interview with Larry Korn. Blog article on finalstraw.org

Lydon, P.M. (2016) 'Farmers, Chefs, and Lawyers: Building an Ecology of One.' Blog article for The Nature of Cities Festival. Available at thenatureofcities.com