Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

existential1 wrote

Well, spelling error...should be fukuoka. But Masanobu Fukuoka was a farmer in Japan who has a few books, The Natural Way of Farming, Sowing Seeds in the Desert, and his most popular book One Straw Revolution. There's also some youtube videos of him being interviewed by Japanese folks.

But his philosophy is basically to work with nature, and that chemical solutions in agriculture are inherently flawed as they disrupt the natural flow of things, very Tao-ish, though he never talks about religion explicitly. He experiments on a rice farm and orange orchard with what we would now describe as permaculture mixed orchard management. Many would consider him, if not the pioneer, certainly the popularizer of seed balls, as he made them in rural Japan many decades ago via his own experimentation.

He came into farming by way of birth, he inherited the farm, but he actually was a scientist before he became very sick and left the world of formal science to go back to the farm. He strongly critiques modern agriculture, including the idea of organic agriculture, because he believed nature to be the driver of solutions and it being humans role to mimic nature as closely as possible if one is ever to break away from the biological/ecological (which is to separate chemical) way of handling problems.

I feel like I've studied his stuff the way a lot of people in here have studied Bakunin or Marx or Proudhon.

5

An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

Sounds interesting! You might do well to post about it generally on raddle.

I wonder if people here have studied Bakunin or Proudhon. I think most of us read more recent stuff.

2

ziq wrote

Fukuoka is great, and Sepp Holzer too.

2

incendialhumano wrote

I feel like I've studied his stuff the way a lot of people in here have studied Bakunin or Marx or Proudhon.

Congrats, you win a cookie!!

1