Masanobu Fukuoka

Who was Masanobu Fukuoka?

Masanobu Fukuoka was a farmer who became famous for what he stopped doing. On his family's land on the Japanese island of Shikoku he grew rice, barley and citrus for decades without ploughing, without chemical fertiliser, without weeding and without pesticides, and, by his own account, harvested as much as his neighbours, often more. He called his way natural farming. Through his book The One-Straw Revolution it reached readers around the world and became one of the roots of the organic and permaculture movements.

For Fukuoka, farming was never only a technique. It was a way of living with humility towards nature. The aim of farming, he wrote, was in the end "the cultivation and perfection of human beings" (The One-Straw Revolution).

His path

Fukuoka was born on 2 February 1913 in Iyo, in Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku. He trained as a microbiologist and agricultural scientist, specialising in plant diseases, and from 1934 worked as a plant inspector for the customs office in Yokohama. In 1937, after a severe bout of pneumonia, he had a profound inner experience that changed his view of nature and of human knowledge. He left his post and returned to his father's citrus groves on Shikoku.

From 1938 he began to experiment there, trying to find out how much of the usual work could be left out. Not everything succeeded at first, and during the war he worked at an agricultural experiment station in Kochi Prefecture. After the war he returned to the farm and from 1947 developed his natural farming of rice and barley without ploughing. He farmed this land for about half a century, wrote his books, and from 1979 travelled widely to share his ideas.

The idea

Fukuoka's natural farming rests on four principles: do not plough or turn the soil, use no chemical fertiliser or prepared compost, do not weed by tillage or herbicides, and use no chemical pesticides. Behind them lies a simple question: what happens if we stop doing the things nature does not need?

His answer could be seen in his fields. He scattered seed instead of planting in rows and covered his rice and barley fields with straw as mulch, so the ground was never bare. His orange trees grew unpruned among grasses, herbs and vegetables, a living ground cover that protected and fed the soil. He called it do-nothing farming, but it rested on very careful observation and precise timing.

For Fukuoka the method was inseparable from a philosophy. People, he believed, cannot improve on nature; they can only learn to accompany it. Every unnecessary intervention creates new problems that require new interventions. Natural farming was his attempt to step out of this cycle.

The work

His most important work is The One-Straw Revolution, published in Japanese in 1975 and in English in 1978, translated by Chris Pearce, Tsune Kurosawa and Larry Korn. It has been translated into more than 20 languages and has sold more than a million copies. Further books followed, among them The Natural Way of Farming (English 1985) and The Road Back to Nature (English 1987); Sowing Seeds in the Desert appeared after his death, in 2012.

His second great work was the regreening of damaged land. Fukuoka revived and developed the old technique of seed balls: seeds of many species mixed with clay and rolled into small balls that protect them until rain softens the clay. From 1979 he travelled widely: to Europe, to Somalia and Ethiopia in 1985, where he also visited a refugee camp, to the United States, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Tanzania, the Philippines and, in 1998, Greece, sowing seeds and teaching wherever he went.

In 1988 he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, whose citation honours him for showing small farmers everywhere that natural farming is a practical, environmentally safe and bountiful alternative. In the same year Visva-Bharati University in India honoured him, and in 1997 he received the Earth Council Award. He died on 16 August 2008 in Iyo, aged 95.

What became of it

Many of Fukuoka's ideas have become part of modern ecological farming: working without ploughing, keeping the soil covered, sowing into living plant cover. Permaculture took up his thinking, and Emilia Hazelip adapted his method to the Mediterranean climate as synergistic agriculture. Seed balls are used today in regreening projects and community gardens around the world. Above all, his book changed how many people look at a field: not as a factory, but as a living community.

What we learn from Masanobu Fukuoka

From Fukuoka we learn to observe before we intervene, and to leave out what the soil does not need. At Sa Medada we do not want to leave the soil bare; for us, ground cover and pioneer plants belong at the beginning. His seed balls are an idea worth testing on hard-to-reach parts of a steep slope like ours, with pioneers and nitrogen fixers that prepare the ground for what comes later.

His method was developed for the humid climate of Japan, and a Sardinian summer is a different teacher. What we take over is therefore less a recipe than an attitude: humility towards the land, patience, and the courage to do less where less is better.