The One-Straw Revolution

Fukuoka trained in plant pathology and worked as an agricultural inspector in Yokohama. As a young man he became convinced that human efforts to improve on nature often cause the very problems they try to solve, and he went home to his father's farm to prove it. The result, refined over more than thirty years, is what he called natural farming, sometimes nicknamed do-nothing farming.

In practice his method is very precise. Rice and winter grain are sown directly into the standing crop before harvest, so the fields are never bare. The straw from each harvest is scattered back over the field, where it protects the soil, suppresses weeds and slowly feeds the next crop. White clover grows underneath as a living cover that enriches the soil. Seeds can be wrapped in little clay pellets to protect them from birds. Fukuoka also describes his citrus orchard and vegetables grown half wild. Around these practical chapters he reflects on modern agriculture, diet, science and the human tendency to complicate life.

Brief, calm and quietly radical. About 200 pages in the New York Review Books edition, with an introduction by Frances Moore Lappé.