A review by atticmoth
The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming by Masanobu Fukuoka
fast-paced
3.0
The One-Straw Revolution is at heart a regenerative agriculture guide (NOT a book about reusable drinking straws!) but it covers so much more territory than just that! Published possibly as a reaction to “green revolution” advances in farming such as pesticides, fertilizers and GMOs, Masanobu Fukuoka, a former lab scientist, details his methodology for natural farming. His advice is probably very useful if you live in Japan and are specifically growing rice and citrus, and although he is repetitive about his methodology it really is an interesting treatise that could be applied to any terroir. Fukuoka champions the “do-nothing” method, which, for rice farming entails not laying any compost besides straw, not tilling or flooding the fields, and relying on planting nitrogen-fixing clover and winter grains as a form of weed control and soil cultivation. It’s all very interesting advice, and though it doesn’t directly pertain to my life, I can see his titular revolution working very well.
The second half of the book is where it gets more thought-provoking. Fukuoka broadens his philosophy to how we relate to the world, synthesizing Buddhist knowledge with his own personal experience. Parts of it felt like a more effective version of Ted K’s manifesto, but Fukuoka makes his anti-technology point much more effectively, and obviously without killing anyone. Something I didn’t like was his constant railing against science and scientists, though. Maybe his anger is justified because he worked in soil labs for years before becoming a farmer, but it’s ironic because for half of the book he is literally describing doing science, the same means with a different end than his green revolution contemporaries. I understand the reactionary nature may be due to historical context, but it did get pretty unoriginal, if a little funny at times:
“[The scientist] pores over books night and day, straining his eyes and becoming nearsighted, and if you wonder what on earth he has been working on all that time—it is to become the inventor of eyeglasses to correct nearsightedness.”
It’s funny but a little mean, and you don’t have to put it that way.
The second half of the book is where it gets more thought-provoking. Fukuoka broadens his philosophy to how we relate to the world, synthesizing Buddhist knowledge with his own personal experience. Parts of it felt like a more effective version of Ted K’s manifesto, but Fukuoka makes his anti-technology point much more effectively, and obviously without killing anyone. Something I didn’t like was his constant railing against science and scientists, though. Maybe his anger is justified because he worked in soil labs for years before becoming a farmer, but it’s ironic because for half of the book he is literally describing doing science, the same means with a different end than his green revolution contemporaries. I understand the reactionary nature may be due to historical context, but it did get pretty unoriginal, if a little funny at times:
“[The scientist] pores over books night and day, straining his eyes and becoming nearsighted, and if you wonder what on earth he has been working on all that time—it is to become the inventor of eyeglasses to correct nearsightedness.”
It’s funny but a little mean, and you don’t have to put it that way.