Author: Masanobu Fukuoka
Publisher: Other India Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 184
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185569312
Description
This book, an all-time classic, is a clarion call to all of us to abandon modern agriculture and its destructive methods and poisons, and to return to our far richer heritage of working closely and simply with the land.
In the One-Straw Revolution, Fukuoka describes the events that led to the development of his natural farming methods and the impact these have had on his land, on himself and the thousands of people who have learnt from his technique.In the process, he has left the very foundations of modern agriculture in splendid disarray.
Masanobu Fukuoka has turned out to be one of the most outstanding farmers of our century. Struck by the manner in which modern agriculture and its methods were destroying the soil, he opted out of his technical career (he had been trained as an agricultural scientist) and returned to his village home.
Here he resumed traditional farming, and refined it so that his methods required less labor and minimal disruption of nature, even while they helped generate crop yields as good as those on neighboring fields heavily dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Fukuoka shows how the way we look at farming influences the way we look at health, the school, nature, nutrition, spiritual health and life itself. He joins the healing of the land to the process of purifying the human spirit and proposes a way of life and a way of farming in which such healing can take place.
Contents
Preface by Partap Aggarwal
Introduction by Larry Korn
Translator's Notes
PART I
Look at this Grain
Nothing at All
Returning to the Country
Toward a Do-Nothing Farming
Returning to the Source
One Reason Natural Farming Has Not Spread
Humanity Does not Know Nature
PART II
Four Principles of Natural Farming
Farming Among the Weeds
Farming with Straw
Growing Rice in a Dry Field
Orchard Trees
Orchard Earth
Growing Vegetables like Wild Plants
The Terms for Abandoning Chemicals
Limits of the Scientific Method
PART III
One Farmer Speaks Out
A Modest Solution to a Difficult Problem
The Fruit of Hard Times
The Marketing of Natural Food
Commercial Agriculture Will Fail
Research for Whose Benefit?
What is Human Food?
A Merciful Death for Barley
Simply Serve Nature and All is Well
Various Schools of Natural Farming
PART IV
Confusion About Food
Nature's Food Mandala
The Culture of food
Living by Bread Alone
Summing up Diet
Food and Farming
PART V
Foolishness Comes Out Looking Smart
Who is the Fool?
I Was Born To Go to Nursery School
Drifting Clouds and the Illusion of Science
The Theory of Relativity
A Village Without War and Peace
The One-Straw Revolution