Some notes from Road Back to Nature, One Straw Revolution and Natural Farming books written by Masanobu Fukuoka.
On “Do-Nothing” Farming
A way of farming exists that require nothing to be done. Few principles:
- It is not possible to know and understand
- Nothing, no matter what it is, has value in and of itself
- Anything done with the human intellect is worthless; it serves no purpose
In a word, ALL is UNNECESSARY. When I arrived at this conclusion, I lost a standard by which to judge what is true and what is false.
In Buddha’s Heart Sutra, it is written that “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. All is nothing.” If one accepts this, it means that all effort is in vain. Buddha is saying that we are not alive, we are not growing, and we are not dead. Buddha says that soul itself is just something that arises from the body, and that neither exist; that the flesh and soul are emptiness.
I set out to confirm this while farming in the fields. I tried to establish whether this idea that we have no need to do anything is valid or not.
What about doing this? What about doing that? But this only makes people busier and makes things harder for the farmer. Preoccupied with the thought of having to do this and that, people are forever worrying. What I did when I became a farmer was to search for things that don’t have to be done. I asked whether the fields really need to be plowed and turned, whether the rice farmer really has to transplant his seedlings, whether it is necessary in fact to spread fertilizer on the fields. Scientific truth is not absolute truth.
Things appear to have value, but invariably man has set up the conditions that give them their apparent value. For example, man created the conditions that require plowing every year. What happens if the land is left in a natural state; as in the mountain forests? Man kills and destroys the soil.
When paddies are filled with water, roots of rice start to rot. And quick acting chemical fertilizers are used to have a booster effect. Man establishes the conditions and then thinks chemical fertilizers give high yields. Developments in chemical technology create earth that has to be plowed. And with the frail, leggy rice that grows as a result, pests break out unless the plants are sprayed with pesticides. All that was really necessary was to come up with some way of enriching the soil while leaving it in nature’s hands.
Also, merely leaving one’s fields alone is not nature. I have striven to this day to learn what the true form of nature is.
sadhana.farm 