Masanobu Fukuoka's The One-Straw Revolution

The novel The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka focuses on Fukuoka’s life as a natural farmer. Fukuoka resorts back to the original ways of farming, without machines, chemicals, fertilizers, preservatives, or growth hormones. Fukuoka explains how there are two different types of agriculture, scientific agriculture, and natural agriculture; proving how one method is superior to the other. Many people believe that new, modern day farming techniques improve the crops being grown; but that is not necessarily the case. Fukuoka explains how society needs to move towards a “do-nothing” method of farming. Fukuoka believes that new farming techniques created by mankind have become necessary because the natural balance has been so badly upset beforehand by those same techniques that the land has become dependent on them, yet if those techniques had never before been used, they would unnecessary (Fukuoka 15). Fukuoka helps make this complex concept easier to grasp by comparing this method to a scientist who invents …show more content…
Through reading this novel I am able to realize the importance of what we learn in class as well. I no longer want to use inorganic fertilizer when I grow plants in a garden knowing the negative chain reaction associated with inorganic fertilizer, even though I had always believed that inorganic fertilizer was beneficial to both the soil and the crop being grown. I had not realized before the amount of people leaving the behind the tradition of farming. The new ideology of farming is to have less people farming using large, modern farming equipment to produce more crop in the same size lot. The number of farmers in Japan has descreased from between 70 and 80% to around 14%. The number of farmers worldwild is dwindling, however, without farmers, there is no