A review by loppear
Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan by Franklin Hiram King

3.0

Fascinating blend of turn-of-the-century steam and rail and rickshaw travelogue through the Far East, but entirely focused on a technical analysis of farming productivity and management. Pushes a central message that US practices of large low-labor farming were/are based on extractive depletion of the soil's resources, compared to the high-labor intensive cyclical management of compost - reuse of all wastes - and irrigation that have sustained generations on much less cultivated land area.