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Fukuoka grew up on a farm on the island of Shikoku in Japan. As a young man he worked as a customs inspector for plants going into and out of the country. This was in the 1930s when science seemed poised to create a new world of abundance and leisure, when people fully believed they could improve upon nature by applying scientific methods and thereby reap untold rewards. While working there, Fukuoka had an insight that changed his life forever. He returned to his home village and applied this insight to developing a revolutionary new way of farming that he believed would be of great benefit to society. This method, which he called "natural farming," involved working with, not in opposition to, nature.
Fukuoka's inspiring and internationally best-selling book, The One-Straw Revolution was first published in English in 1978. In this book, Fukuoka described his philosophy of natural farming and why he came to farm the way he did. One-Straw was a huge success in the West, and spoke directly to the growing movement of organic farmers and activists seeking a new way of life. For years after its publication, Fukuoka traveled around the world spreading his teachings and developing a devoted following of farmers seeking to get closer to the truth of nature.
Sowing Seeds in the Desert, a summation of those years of travel and research, is Fukuoka's last major work-and perhaps his most important. Fukuoka spent years working with people and organizations in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States, to prove that you could, indeed, grow food and regenerate forests with very little irrigation in the most desolate of places. Only by greening the desert, he said, would the world ever achieve true food security.
This revolutionary book presents Fukuoka's plan to rehabilitate the deserts of the world using natural farming, including practical solutions for feeding a growing human population, rehabilitating damaged landscapes, reversing the spread of desertification, and providing a deep understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature. Fukuoka's message comes right at the time when people around the world seem to have lost their frame of reference, and offers us a way forward.
Introduction xi
Editor's Notes xxix
About the Illustrations xxxiii
1 The Call to Natural Farming 1
My Return to Farming 4
Challenges During Wartime 6
The True Meaning of Nature 8
The Errors of Human Thought 9
No God or Buddha Will Rescue the Human Race 13
The Dragonfly Will Be the Messiah 14
A Life of Natural Culture 15
2 Reconsidering Human Knowledge 21
The Birth of Discriminating Knowledge 21
Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection 23
Understanding True Time and Space 25
The Rising and Sinking of Genes 27
An Alternative View of Evolution 29
Naturally Occurring Hybrids in My Rice Fields 31
Abandoning What We Think We Know 34
3 Healing a World In Crisis 41
Restoring the Earth and Its People 42
In Nature, There Are No Beneficial or Harmful Insects 43
Eastern and Western Medicine 44
The Fear of Death 47
The Question of Spirit 49
The Money-Sucking Octopus Economy 50
The Illusion of the Law of Causality 56
The Current Approach of Desertification Countermeasures 60
4 Global Desertification 69
Lessons from the Landscapes of Europe and the United States 70
The Tragedy of Africa 75
Sowing Seeds in an African Refugee Camp 79
5 Revegetating the Earth Through Natural Methods 85
Agricultural "Production" Is Actually Deduction 88
Commercial Feedlots Will Destroy the Land, Cultured Fish the Sea 90
Sowing Seeds in the Desert 92
Creating Greenbelds 95
The Revegetation of India 99
Notes from an International Environmental Summit 113
6 Travels on the West Coast of the United States 121
Farmer's Markets 124
Urban Natural Farms 128
People Sow and Birds Sow 129
Rice Growing in the Sacramento Valley 134
From Organic Farming to Natural Farming 136
Two International Conferences 141
Japanese Cedars at the Zen Center 145
Appendices
Appendix A Creating a Natural Farm in Temperature and Subtropical Zones 151
Appendix B Making Clay Seed Pellets for Use in Revegetation 161
Appendix C Producing an All-Around Natural Culture Medium 166
Overview
The earth is in great peril, due to the corporatization of agriculture, the rising climate crisis, and the ever-increasing levels of global poverty, starvation, and desertification on a massive scale. This present condition of global trauma is not "natural," but a result of humanity's destructive actions. And, according to Masanobu Fukuoka, it is reversible. We need to change not only our methods of earth stewardship, but also the very way we think about the relationship ...