Master Quote: Masanobu Fukuoka – 03/07/18

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Source: http://www.onestrawrevolution.net/One_Straw_Revolution/One-Straw_Revolution.html

"I actually wandered about with the intention of spreading the word throughout the whole country.

The outcome was that wherever I went I was ignored as an eccentric. So I returned to my father's farm in the country.

My father was growing tangerines at that time and I moved into a hut on the mountain and began to live a very simple, primitive life. I thought that if here, as a farmer of citrus and grain, I could actually demonstrate my realization, the world would recognize its truth. Instead of offering a hundred explanations, would not practicing this philosophy be the best way? My method of "do-nothing" [With this expression Mr. Fukuoka draws attention to his method's comparative ease. This way of farming requires hard work, especially at the harvest, but far less than other methods] farming began with this thought. It was in the 13th year of the present emperor's reign, 1938.

I settled myself on the mountain and everything went well up to the time that my father entrusted me with the richly-bearing trees in the orchard. He had already pruned the trees to "the shape of sake cups" so that the fruit could easily be harvested. When I left them abandoned in this state, the result was that the branches became intertwined, insects attacked the trees and the entire orchard withered away in no time:

My conviction was that crops grow themselves and should not have to be grown. I had acted in the belief that everything should be left to take its natural course, but I found that if you apply this way of thinking all at once, before long things do not go so well. This is abandonment, not "natural farming.

My father was shocked. He said I must rediscipline myself, perhaps take a job somewhere and return when I had pulled myself back together."

 

~Masanobu Fukuoka

The One-Straw Revolution - 1978

Chapter 1

Subsection: Returning to the Country

Content commentary by Larry Korn

Page 13

 


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