Rating: WARTY!
The library had this book on a display about water use and smart farming. It sounded interesting, but turned out to be not so much once I started reading it. It was first published in 1996, and unfortunately is filled with "Gaia" talk along the lines of the whole planet being one living, breathing entity and it's blabbering about spirit and stuff, which is odd given that the authors appears to be an atheist. Some of what Fukuoka says makes sense, but none of what he says is ground-breaking or hitherto unknown. The author's main thesis seems to be that plants which have grown wild and become used to local conditions will do better than artificially engineered or bred plants. Well duhh!
The books seems full of contradiction, too. He talks on the one hand of naturally revitalizing areas which human depredation have rendered waste land, yet he derides attempts to irrigate those same areas and grow plants. Either growing stuff there will contribute to increased rainfall, as he advocates, or it will achieve nothing, as he also claims in deriding these projects! He doesn't seem to grasp that increased rainfall won't automatically precipitate just because you plant seeds and get a few plants growing. There are climactic, geographical, and topological reasons for rainfall or the lack of it. No one ruined the land to create the Sahara. That happened perfectly naturally.
In other instances he repeatedly says there are no bad insects - such as on page 43, where the page title is "In Nature There are No Beneficial or Harmful Insects" which is such patent bullshit that it would definitely fertilize crops organically. Later, he talks of protecting plants from insects and disease - such as on p93 (protect the seeds from animals and insects), p109 (susceptible to insects and disease), and p156 (more resistant to insects and disease). If there are no bad insects and no disease, why must we protect plants?! This scatter-brained approach to writing undermines everything he says.
Another contradiction lay in his relation of a story about an orchard on his family's farm. On the one hand, later in the book, he talks about letting nature work in our favor instead of fighting it, but at the start of chapter one, he tells us of this orchard which as a young man, he left to its own devices purely from his own laziness (i.e. letting nature rule instead of tending the trees). The result was that 200 trees died. What he did was natural farming - not doing anything to the trees and letting nature take its course, yet immediately after telling us this story of the dead trees, he then claims what he did wasn't natural farming! He makes no sense. He doesn't even revisit this to explain to us what he ought to have done - how the death of his two hundred apple trees could have been avoided.
The book is all over the place and full of unsupported anecdote. Repeated tales of the nature, "I did X and got a wonderful result Y" do not explain anything, or support his thesis - whatever that was supposed to be (he never really makes it clear other than to say nature knows best which is patently obvious). There are a lot of people who urge us to go back to nature, back to organic, back to the land, but not a one of them addresses the massive increase in farming yields brought about by modern farming methods or how we're to feed seven billion people by living as hunter gatherers.
Admittedly a lot of the bounty produced by modern farming techniques unfortunately goes to waste or to feed animals instead of feeding starving people, but you can't argue with the yield which is far higher than nature's original versions of the fruits and grains ever was. The truth is that there is nothing that we farm which is 'natural' - defined as 'exists in this form in nature'. Everything out there is a result of genetic manipulation - except that the purists are too dishonest to call it that. The food we enjoy was originally not manipulated in a lab in the manner in which modern agribusiness pursues those same aims, but it certainly was genetically manipulated for quantity and size over many years by farmers.
Fukuoka is absolutely right in his assertion that no gods or Buddhas will save us. The plain fact is that no gods have ever saved us or ever will; it's in our hands, and we've screwed it up, but vague appeals to some non-existent, nebulous 'golden past' will not save us either. Neither will claims that there are no parasites and harmful insects. Yes, there are! Nature is indeed red in tooth and claw - and in virus and parasite. That doesn't mean we've been smart in attacking these problems, but sticking our fingers in your ears and chanting "Gaia will save us! Gaia will save us" doesn't work either. If it did, humanity would not have been almost wiped out a few thousand years ago - and Homo sapiens wouldn't be the only human species remaining on the planet. Everything save for about one percent of all living things has been wiped out, and none save the most recent of those were wiped out because ancient Middle-East farmers genetically manipulated crops or laid waste to land, or because Cro-Magnon people used chemical farming methods.
Fukuoka is woefully ignorant about evolution, and anyone who ignores or misunderstands those particular facts of life is doomed. Yes creationists, I'm looking at you. There was no oxygen on Earth when life first began. No free oxygen, that is - it was bound up in minerals and compounds. Contrary to Fukuoka's evident belief, it was life which produced the very oxygen which in the end killed life. Only those organisms which had mutations which could handle this highly poisonous and dangerously corrosive gas - a waste product back then - survived to go on to evolve into what we see today. The old life - the anaerobic life as we now know it - exists only in obscure, out-of-the-way locations these days, buried in mud, hidden away from the deadly oxygen which would lay waste to it. Yes, modern life lived on the excrement of anaerobic life!
Fukuoka also appears rather clueless about the nature of time and of the value of taxonomy, and he seems ignorant of the fact that E=MC² was in the scientific air long before Einstein derived it. Scientists like Henri Poincaré and Fritz Hasenöhrl had been all over it, but had never put it all together in the way Einstein did.
At one point in this book (p86) there's a footnote which declares that Fukuoka is not saying his orchard was grown on a desert, yet less than a dozen pages later (p97), he says in the text "You may think it reckless for me to say that we can revegetate the desert. Although I have confirmed the theory in my own mind and in my orchard..." Clearly he is thinking of his orchard as a desert. And good luck with confirming a theory in your own mind very scientific! LOL! The problem is that he never actually defines desert so we don't know if he views a desert in the way in which deserts are commonly defined (through rainfall or lack thereof), or if he merely means impoverished land or land to which waste has been laid in one way or another. He appears never to have heard of the dangers of invasive species either in his advocating taking seeds from Thailand to plant in India to revegetate the deserts there. India has no native vegetation that would serve this purpose?
So no, I have no faith in what this author claims except in the very vaguest of terms: yes, variety is better than monoculture, and yes, we can't keep poisoning our planet in the name of agriculture, but experiments confirmed the mind are not the same as real practical verified results, and he offers no references for any of the claims he makes, so for me the take home was nothing I didn't already know. I refuse to recommend this book.
