Masanobu Fukuoka

Masanobu Fukuoka (1913 – 2008) was a Japanese farmer, biologist and philosopher, best known for his advocacy and practice of what he called natural farming. His thinking matters because it challenged the idea that growing food requires constant ploughing, fertilising, spraying and tilling, and proposed a way of cultivating that works with the processes of the ecosystem rather than against them.

He came from a family of farmers with a long history on the land. He trained as a scientist in soil science and plant pathology and worked in agricultural research, but around 1937, after a bout of pneumonia and what he later described as a profound spiritual experience, he began to doubt modern agronomy. He left his research post and returned to the family farm on Shikoku island, where he grew mikan citrus without chemicals. During the war he worked at an agricultural experiment station. After postwar land reform took most of the family's holdings, he resumed natural farming and made it work. In 1975 he published The One-Straw Revolution, translated into English in 1978, which became his best-known book. From 1979 he travelled widely, giving lectures and taking part in projects to re-vegetate desertified land in Africa, Asia and Europe.

His method rests on four principles: no ploughing or tilling, no prepared fertilisers or compost, no weeding by machine or herbicide, and no pesticides. Behind them lies a Taoist and Zen idea, wu wei, or non-doing, which treats human intervention as something to be kept to a minimum. To sow, he developed clay seed balls, which mix seeds with clay and are scattered over the field; the first heavy rain breaks them open and the seedlings emerge protected. He argued that the soil would regenerate over time and crops would improve while labour fell. For Fukuoka, farming was not only about producing food but also a path toward human cultivation and perfection.

His influence was considerable in the organic farming movement and in permaculture, and his book has been translated into more than twenty languages. Not all of his methods transfer easily to every farm: the writer Wendell Berry noted that many of his techniques were not directly applicable to most American farms, though he thought it would be a mistake to dismiss the practical passages of the book. Even so, his work remains a reference for those seeking farming with fewer inputs and closer attention to natural cycles.