The plant scientist who quit his lab to practise do-nothing farming
A bout of pneumonia at 24 convinced Masanobu Fukuoka that modern agricultural science had it wrong. He left his job as a plant pathologist, went home to his family's orchards, and spent seventy years proving that rice and barley could thrive without ploughing, compost, weeding or chemical sprays.
Fukuoka was born in Iyo, Ehime, on 2 February 1913, the second son of a wealthy landowner. Trained as a microbiologist, he worked from 1934 as a customs plant inspector in Yokohama. Hospitalised in 1937, he described a spiritual awakening that made him doubt Western farming methods, and he promptly resigned and returned to the family farm on Shikoku.
His first experiments taught a hard lesson. When he stopped pruning some citrus trees, insects moved in and branches tangled, which showed him that abandoning a plant is not the same as letting nature work. The war interrupted him, and postwar land reform left his father with only three-eighths of an acre of rice land plus the hillside orchards. From 1947 he nonetheless grew rice and barley successfully without tilling. His approach, shizen nōhō, rested on four refusals: no ploughing, no prepared fertiliser or compost, no weeding by tillage or herbicide, and no pesticides. By the 1980s his family was sending about 90 tonnes of citrus a year to Tokyo.
The One-Straw Revolution, published in 1975 and in English three years later, sold more than a million copies in over 20 languages and influenced permaculture. From 1979 he travelled widely, reviving the old technique of clay seed balls to sow deserts, spending 40 days in Somalia and Ethiopia in 1985 and helping plan the re-vegetation of 10,000 hectares near Lake Vegoritida in Greece. In 1988 he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often called Asia's Nobel Prize.
His methods proved harder than they look. He put first-year yield losses around 10 percent, while followers such as Yoshikazu Kawaguchi saw crop failures from strict imitation and years of adaptation. Researchers at the Food and Agriculture Organization argued in the early 2000s that rejecting machinery was unjustifiable, though no-till and cover crops have since gained wide support. He died on 16 August 2008, aged 95.
Source: Masanobu Fukuoka
