Just over a year after his death, FUKUOKA Masanobu was the main topic of conversation at our Thanksgiving meal table today. Fukuoka was an amazing man who I had the chance to meet at his farm on Shikoku Island back in 1985, when I was living in Japan. His contributions to agriculture, permaculture and profound philosophies undergirding farming, nature and life are innumerable.
Here is a video of Fukuoka and helpers making seed balls for permaculture planting.
You can read a short obituary on 'Permaculture Reflections' and read below of brother Stephen's account of how his life was changed.
By Stephen Bartlett
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Masanobu Fukuoka's work, thought and farm had a life-changing impact on myself and my family. In 1987, February, my wife Ada and I traveled from China where we were teaching to Japan to visit my brother, on one condition: that he arrange for us to visit Fukuoka. We had read the One Straw Revolution with fascination. To make a long story short, we spent about a week in Iyo, mostly alone in the thatched hut, except for a young Norwegian vegan woman helping Fukuoka with his pine tree disease research.
Only reluctantly did we go over to his hut later
that morning. But Fukuoka was a changed man: welcoming us warmly into
his hut for tea. He spent the whole afternoon with us telling us
stories, timing them once with the explosion of
a section of bamboo which he neglected to cut a hole into to release
the overheated air. He did calligraphy in our books and we learned a
lot.
The next morning after we helped his son pack the oranges into
boxes destined for health food stories in Tokyo,
we went for a slide show at Fukuoka's house in town at his invitation.
He showed us aerial photos of the US northwest, of clear cuts and gully
erosion and told us we should remedy this situation. Then he did
something remarkable. He handed me three seed heads
of his rice, 750 grains, to smuggle into China, to "make up in a tiny
way for the death and destruction the Japanese had caused to the
Chinese people." Then he jotted down in old Chinese characters the
name of a man we should share the seeds with.
Miraculously,
upon our return to Yangzhou, in Jiangsu Province China, we discovered
that the man was one Prof Huang, plant breeder at the small
agricultural college we were staying at. Not only did this seed
improve the career of Mr. Huang, but that seed variety we hand
carried to Yangzhou became a major seed variety in the province for its
high yield, vigor and disease resistance. This lesson of the power of
seeds and the importance of keen observation of the natural world
spurred me to actually go into farming myself.
I bought a 10 acre farm in the Dominican Republic, my wife's homeland,
where we lived for several years in the 1990s raising our three baby
children and eeking out a living off the land. I tried to apply the
philosophy of agriculture I had learned from Fukuoka,
with some considerable success. Today these same principles have
turned some urban plots here in Louisville, Kentucky into highly
fertile places of abundance and nourishment.
It saddens me that Fukuoka has left this world, but I am
certain that his example lives on in many, many people. I am just one
example of that. Natural farming is the future. Peasants and family
farmers the world over share some of that vision.
See www.viacampesina.org
for more information about the world wide movement of ecological
farmers struggling for democratic control over local agriculture.
Peace through "Do Nothing" farming!
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Grateful this day for the life of Masanobu Fukuoka. I will light a candle this evening for the life-giving farming that he has inspired and continues to inspire around the world.
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