Masanobu Fukuoka
Do-nothing farming: no plough, no chemical fertiliser, no prepared compost, seed broadcast into standing straw — at yields that matched Japan’s best conventional farms.
The record
- Standing
- foundational work
- Years
- 1913–2008
- Based
- Iyo, Shikoku, Japan
- Trained as
- Plant pathologist; worked as a plant inspector for Yokohama Customs before returning to his father’s orange groves at twenty-five.
- The method
- No ploughing. No weeding by tillage or herbicide. No machines, no insecticide, no chemical fertiliser and no prepared compost. Seed broadcast rather than drilled, and the fields strewn with straw. Rice fields not flooded.
- Recognition
- Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, 1988.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Fukuoka spent sixty-five years subtracting. He was trained as a plant pathologist and left the profession at twenty-five to farm his family’s groves on Shikoku, and the method he arrived at is defined by what is absent from it: no plough, no agricultural chemicals, no prepared fertiliser, no flooding of the rice paddies that Asian farmers had flooded for centuries.
The reason it is taken seriously rather than treated as asceticism is the yield. His fields equalled or exceeded the most productive farms in Japan, on ground that was gaining rather than losing structure.
The One-Straw Revolution was written in 1975 and reached English in 1978, after which students, scientists and agricultural workers began arriving at the farm. The Magsaysay Award citation in 1988 recognised the demonstration to small farmers that natural farming is a practical and bountiful alternative rather than a philosophical one. He died in August 2008, aged ninety-five.
Where to read them
- The One-Straw Revolution (1975; English edition 1978) The book, and the archive maintained around it by its English translator’s circle.
- Sowing Seeds in the Desert The later work, on applying the method to degraded and arid land.
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.