The one straw revolution is a
farming technique that was developed over thirty years by Masanobu
Fukuoka for his personal use on his own farm in Japan. It boils down to
"use no fossil fuels, no pesticides, no artificial fertilizers, and
take only food from the fields." Reading it, I felt like I was
listening to an old Amish farmer explaining why the hand methods are
best. One key is the timing of the plantings, which covers half of one
of the 181 pages of the book:
There is much more detail, and it
all makes lots of sense. As Wendall Berry explains in the introduction,
Mr. Fukuoka was a laboratory scientist before seeing the limitations of
that and becoming a farmer. In addition to this, there is a
lot of quite interesting retelling of the story of what happened when
he
tried to get the mainstream to adopt his strategies. Seen from his
point of view, the way suppliers are "bought into" selling big machines
seems downright corrupt:
I suppose if you make a living on
commissions from sales, getting thousands of dollars per farmer sounds
a lot better than getting a small percentage of $3.50. He has the same
problem or even more so when talking about pesticides with a government
official at a conference focused on ways to solve the pollution problem.
All of this leads Fukuoka to the
conclusion that we have troubled times ahead. He reflects that
The book was published in 1978. My
sister who lives on a small farm in Georgia gave it to me. She wanted
me to read the thing and pass it on. If you're interested in reading
The One Straw Revolution, let me know and we'll figure out how to hand
it off. If that doesn't work for you, I hope you see a copy when you
are browsing books sometime. Please, pick it up and read a bit. I think
you'll get something out of it.
.1865
.
A "do nothing"
movement. I read a biography about Abraham Lincoln that said one of the
key founding movements of the Republican Party was a group that was
characterized as "cranberry farmers" that were called "The Know
Nothings". I'm wondering if they had the same kind of insight. I've not
read enough about them to know.
