Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on July 17, 2012 | 8 Comments
One of the first books I read when I became interested in sustainable farming was Masanobu Fukuoka’s classic One Straw Revolution. His four principles of natural or ‘do nothing’ farming – no tillage, no fertilizer, no weeding, no chemicals – seemed powerful and persuasive, and his results – superior yields, superior income, less work – seemed to speak for themselves. Throw in a humble, life-affirming, Buddhist-inflected nature philosophy and it all amounted to a pretty attractive package for an impressionable would-be farmer.
With five years of commercial growing now under my belt I’ve just re-read the book. I wouldn’t say that my enthusiasm for it has waned, exactly, but I think I’m now in a position to ask some tougher questions of it. For example, Fukuoka himself pointed out that ‘do nothing’ farming doesn’t necessarily mean ‘no work’ farming. But how much work? At several points in the book he referred to ‘the young people who come to the mountain huts’ on his farm and helped him voluntarily in his work. Well, how many young people? How much work did they do? Fukuoka claimed good rice and barley yields, but over what areas and with how much labour input? He also claimed better financial returns for natural farming, because of low input costs and less need for cosmetic quality control. And, most fundamentally, he used a permanent clover sward for his staple crops which he didn’t till, simply weakening it by flooding – a model that few others seem to have succeeded with, except for large-scale conventional no till farmers using herbicide applications.
Now I’ve never been to Fukuoka’s farm, or even to Japan, and I have no reason to doubt his achievements, nor any intention to do so. What he did obviously worked for him in the particular ecological and economic context in which he farmed. I’m sure he was an excellent farmer. But it does seem to me interesting that – given the many apparent benefits of his methods – rather little progress has been made in advancing them. Perhaps he was lucky with the relative prices of inputs and produce for ‘natural’ vis-a-vis ‘conventional’ farm products when he was farming. Certainly, there seem to be few organic or ‘alternative’ growers around in the UK at the moment who are doing better financially than their ‘conventional’ counterparts, and the organic market here is in rapid retreat. Perhaps Fukuoka was also lucky with his water sources and with the pest-predator balance on his farm. Or perhaps he was just unusually clever, and figured out better ways of dealing with the various problems he faced as a farmer than the rest of us (I imagine his background in plant science helped, for all his thunderous criticisms of the scientific mindset).
It doesn’t really matter – reading his book again, I learned from it and reflected anew on my own farming practice. In that sense, once again I found his writing useful and inspiring. But it does matter if Fukuoka and others like him are elevated to the status of gurus or, worse, systematisers and doctrine-mongers whose practices it is assumed can simply be transplanted anywhere else. When that happens, the original insights are coarsened. So for example a useful analysis of why tillage is often problematic becomes a simple injunction: thou shalt not till. In this way, someone from whom other farmers might learn becomes elevated to an impossible ideal against which their own efforts can only be judged negatively. It’s at around this point that useful exemplification becomes hagiography, or even deification.
These are times when many people are looking for better and more ‘natural’ ways of doing things, amid a widespread distrust of science, technology and the ideal of progress. In many ways I consider myself part of that movement. But I distrust gurus, sages, prophets, messiahs and snake oil salesman. I don’t consider Fukuoka himself to be any such thing, though there are people around only too willing to elevate him and others like him to such a status – as for example in this debate hosted by the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia. If our own farming fails to live up to the standards of natural farming set by the likes of Fukuoka it may well be because he was a better and more insightful farmer than us, or because he was luckier than us with history or geography. Or both. All that anyone can do is reflect on the practical lessons for themselves. But I think we should avoid doctrinaire conclusions that we failed because we weren’t ‘proper’ natural farmers, incapable of following the path laid down on tablets of stone (or, in Fukuoka’s case, international bestsellers) by the founders. That’s the path of religious sectarianism, and at the end of it lies ossification and irrelevance.
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I am sure Fukuoka himself would agree with you:
“I tell the young people in my orchard again and again not to try to imitate me”.
I can’t find it right now, but I am sure he says something like “don’t copy this approach, but simply the idea of doing less instead of doing more – letting nature do what it does best”.
That seems to be the key – his way of solving problems is a useful one, but his particular solutions aren’t of much value to anyone apart from himself…
Thanks Ben, that sounds about right. It reminds me of Karl Marx saying “if anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist”! As is usually the case, the fault isn’t with the guru but with camp followers who insist on deification. But I think Fukuoka stokes the fire a bit by claiming to be able to produce more, work less and get better financial returns. If people take that as gospel, they may then assume that anyone failing to do so isn’t farming properly, and that gets us nowhere – that, at any rate, seemed to be one direction the Australian permaculture debate was going. Still, what’s most important about Fukuoka is his no till/no fertiliser system (apart from chicken manure…which prompts yet more questions) for cereals. If such systems could be widely implemented the benefits would be enormous. So it interests me that progress to date has been so slow. Was there something Fukuoka didn’t tell us?
It was all going so well. I agreed with your post and even more with Ben’s comment and even the start of your reply but then I detected a hint of self parody and find my self wondering if it is you who are not telling us something?
Chris said “But it does matter if Fukuoka and others like him are elevated to the status of gurus or, worse, systematisers and doctrine-mongers whose practices it is assumed can simply be transplanted anywhere else. When that happens, the original insights are coarsened”.
And then Chris said “Still, what’s most important about Fukuoka is his no till/no fertiliser system [SYSTEMATISER] (apart from chicken manure…which prompts yet more questions) for cereals. If such systems [SYSTEMATISER] could be widely implemented [DOGMA MONGER]the benefits would be enormous. So it interests me that progress to date has been so slow. Was there something Fukuoka didn’t tell us?”. So a reluctant Guru finds himself doubted and criticised for not achieving exactly what a guru is supposed not to achieve. Can’t win?
Fukuoka’s method is inrpsiing to me at a deep level, but he himself suggested that the dozens of specific interactions (insect, arachnid, bird, microbe, weed, weather, timing, etc) on his land would require years of recalibrating on any other piece of land. A decade or more of his career was marked by what must have been expensive failures, and he was always dedicated to rice and citrus. I cannot find documentation of any successful followers except one man, Kawaguchi Yoshikazu. Another archetypal natural farmer, Sepp Holzer, seems to have had more up-front success (from childhood onward) but has faced enormous legal hurdles and fines in his work.Another Japanese grower, Takao Furuno, seems like an easier person to follow, and it is claimed that tens of thousands of smallholders throughout Asia use his techniques. His book Power of Duck is very straightforward (but very badly edited!) I feel like I could start such a farm system a duck/rice/fish/waterplant/green manure polyculture with timed duck grazing, electric fencing, and floodable paddies.
Well I’m tempted to say that that’s a fair cop Paul, but I also think that there’s an element of semantics in the issue you’re raising. I should perhaps have been more careful in the way I introduced the words ‘systematiser’ and ‘system’, but there’s a difference between using a system and being a systematiser, and even more importantly there’s a difference between being a systematiser and being the kind of systematiser who insists that the system is fixed, perfect and non-negotiable (ie a doctrine-monger).
I think it would be hard to argue convincingly that any human (and indeed any non-human) method of food/resource capture is not systematic in significant respects, and that these systems may well find applications beyond the contexts in which they were originally developed – that’s basically what agriculture has done, very successfully but also very problematically (the same could be said of hunting/gathering, and many animal/plant strategies and migrations). My problem really is only with the human notion that you must do X because the Guru did X, and if you don’t do X then you are an infidel.
I tried not to indict Fukuoka himself too much in my post, because I agree that in some respects he is indeed a reluctant guru and he can’t particularly be criticised for failing to establish new agricultural systems. But then again, he did write two books in which he made very strong claims about the defects of existing agricultural systems, the superiority of his methods and results, and the importance of his way of thinking about agriculture. And much of it is written (or at least translated) in a highly stylised, Guru-like language. In that respect, I’d argue that he wasn’t quite as reluctant a Guru as you suggest, and I don’t consider my rather mild criticisms of him to be unfair.
Hi Chris
Just read a few of your posts, and agree with Patrick that you are worth reading. If you’re planning on going to the convergence later this month, perhaps we could meet up and chat.
Deano
Hi Deano, thanks for that – I’m glad you’ve found my posts of interest. Unfortunately I won’t be at the convergence this year, but do feel free to share your thoughts with me on this site. I’ll try to get to a convergence again one of these years.
cheers
Chris
I mean: You write very well, you convey the communication meanings very well, very effectively, and your choice of words is very effective.
p.s. delete my previous posting.
Thank you,
Scott