act3

“We are feeding seven billion people, but we can’t go on feeding seven billion people with agriculture. Why? Because agriculture is wasting resources left, right, and centre. Stripping the fertility of one place for another place but in doing that, in the ploughing, in the spraying, the weeding, whatever it may be, the fertilizing, it’s actually destroying the very soil that it is actually trying to grow the crops in.

So we haven’t got more than 50% of the arable soils that we had 50 years ago. We’re losing top soil at an incredible rate. That is what we call fertility, but that is all the life doing what it does in the soil. When that goes, you just get granular soil. And it takes a hell of a lot more resources to get something to grow in that soil than it does in a good, organic, rich top soil.”



“We demand that pineapple from Brazil, we demand to eat tomatoes in winter. That is what causes the destruction; we have to be aware all the time, conscious, watching ourselves, watching how we desire things: I want this, I need that, and I want it now. Well, if we continue to do that, we’re going to continue to destroy the world. All we’re doing is using Nature as an extraction; we’re mining Nature to fill up this great void, this great emptiness we have inside us, because we see ourselves as Human and the world as Nature, they’re separate, we’re not connected… we miss the point. Every time we destroy anything, we destroy ourselves at the very same time. Whereas all we need to do is just take a step back, take a moment of calm, some quiet, and see what Nature is already doing. Because the power of Nature far outdoes any power that human beings think that they have.”

“What am I doing in the garden? I’m playing. I’m just enjoying myself, first and foremost. I go there each day, I don’t actually have in mind what I’m going to do, but it is always something. When I walk into the garden something will catch my eye and I’ll go off and do it. But I recognize what I have to do is, each time, see what Nature is doing. What I have to do is attend, attend to Nature, pay attention to it, give myself over to it. And in that attending I learn how to tend, and what I mean by tend there is I learn how to let Nature do what it knows far better than I do. It’s always Nature that grows plants. So it’s a way of step by step moving myself away from that central, organizing, controlling role that we all have with our gardens.

Natural farming simply tries to reconnect us to Nature, to open us up through the gentle practice, the craft of natural farming.
If we’re really serious about hearing what Fukuoka says we have to pay attention to what he says: “Natural Farming is not about the growing of crops, but about the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”