The English word Agriculture from mid 15th Century CE is rooted in the Late Latin Agricultura comprising ager and cultura. Ager is field and Cultura, cultivation. Agriculture is defined as “The art or science of cultivating the ground, including the harvesting of crops and rearing and management of livestock.” (Wikipedia, National Geographic)
This extractive and utilitarian definition of agriculture as growing food for commerce and human consumption is par for the times we live in. Humans sit outside the land in the modern urban imagination, free from bondage to it, and the real purpose of life is consuming the products of the modern world – of which, one is food. Food, while remaining a necessity of life for billions, is now simply a source of culinary enjoyment for the few. The word ‘agriculture’ in its contemporary Western usage also denotes the one of many hundreds of occupation categories in a post-Industrial world, and a source of livelihood for a minuscule minority in uncharted rural areas that remain in the West. Agriculture is divorced from the way of life it once defined for the vast majority of people in all civilisations.
Looking to pre-industrial, predominantly rural societies in Europe and United Kingdom 200 years back, and in India and similar post-colonial societies 75 years ago, tilling the field and living off the bounty the land produced was the preoccupation of most. Society was tied to the land as a source of physical, social and spiritual sustenance, and it defined certain values and approach to individual and community living. The churchyard in the older sense is ‘God’s acre.’ In medieval Latin, cultura meant adoration or veneration. Culture by 1500 CE was the figurative sense of ‘cultivation through education, systematic improvement and refinement of the mind’. By this time, there came about an association of the finer things in life with the city and the village was left with the rougher elements.
It is a fundamental fallacy of our Western cousins to believe we can live forever off the city, industry, technology and cash after having ‘conquered’ nature; that the cultivation of nutritive food can be left to corporations, machines and someone else other than me; and that all occupations can be dependent on humanmade materials fired by fossil fuels or even natural sources. Agricultural thinking, in its broadest sense of a life lived in harmony with land, forest and nature, must feed the imagination of an alternative lifestyle for a way to co-exist with the modern, post-industrial age. It is not an escape into the past.
If one re-imagines the word ‘agriculture’, could it not mean the cultivation of the mind?
“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”Masanobu Fukuoka
The Sanskrit word कृषि (Krishi) is agriculture, tilling the land. कृषक or किसान is farmer, हाली is a ploughman. The Sanskrit root word कृ is ‘to make’. कृषा is to ‘draw, drag along, pull about, carry away’.
Could we be allowed to dream that Krishi has etymological roots in ऋषि (Rishi), the sages of India who lived in and were of the forest hermitages at a time when forests were widespread, and people were few. This give us an opening to explore the proper relationships between humankind, nature and farming.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008) are illuminating guides from the Asian tradition, both one with nature. Nature pervaded every part of Tagore’s thinking and works and Fukuoka was a farmer living in nature for decades. Their writings support my short 8 years’ experience that practicing agriculture in nature can lead to a cultivation of the mind. I commenced with observing nature as an awkward outsider with many pre-conceived notions, moved to getting rid of these through immersion in the land, and today nature is nearer my inner self that it ever has been. There is now an ‘inter-being’, a closeness, a realisation of unity with nature, instead of the duality of the observer and the observed. I am acutely aware that this is but the start of a lifelong journey. I have come to know intimately each part of the at the land, where water flows and where it stops, where the shade of trees is sufficient or too much for which crop, heard and saw hundreds of species of insects and did not find pests, found new friends in scores of local weeds and trees, saw scores of new bird species, marvelled at the billions of billions of micro-organisms that live in the soil that give it that lovely सौंधा (wet earth) smell, and encouraged hundreds of local saplings to grow wild.
Tagore’s 1922 essay ‘The Religion of the Forest’ shares with us ancient India’s view of nature, a picture that remains embedded in our lives and culture even today when so much of nature has been irretrievably lost.
“This ideal of perfection preached by the forest-dwellers of ancient India runs through the heart of our classical literature and still dominates our mind. The legends related in our epics cluster under the forest shade bearing all through their narrative the message of the forest-dwellers. Our two greatest classical dramas find their background in scenes of the forest hermitage, which are permeated by the association of these sages.”
“When we know this world as alien to us, then its mechanical aspect takes prominence in our mind; and then we set up our machines and our methods to deal with it and make as much profit as our knowledge of its mechanism allows us to do.”
“In the Western dramas, human characters drown our attention in the vortex of their passions. Nature occasionally peeps out, but she is almost always a trespasser, who has to offer excuses, or bow apologetically and depart. But in all our dramas which still retain their fame, such as Mrit-Shakatika, Shakuntala, Uttara-Ramacharita, Nature stands on her own right, proving that she has her great function, to impart the peace of the eternal to human emotions.”
“…the spirit of the forest retreat, which is sharanyam sarva-bhutanam (where all creatures find their protection of love).”
“In the Ramayana, Rama and his companions, in their banishment, had to traverse forest after forest; they had to live in leaf-thatched huts, to sleep on the bare ground. But as their hearts felt their kinship with woodland, hill, and stream, they were not in exile amidst these….. But, in the Ramayana, we are led to realise the greatness of the hero, not in a fierce struggle with Nature, but in sympathy with it, Sita, the daughter-in-law of a great kingly house, goes along the forest paths.”
“I hope it is needless for me to say that these observations are not intended to minimize Shakespeare’s great power as a dramatic poet, but to show in his works the gulf between Nature and human nature owing to the tradition of his race and time. It cannot be said that beauty of nature is ignored in his writings; only he fails to recognize in them the truth of the interpenetration of human life with the cosmic life of the world.”
“In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the very subject – Man dwelling in the garden of Paradise – seems to afford a special opportunity for bringing out the true greatness of man’s relationship with Nature. But though the poet has described to us the beauties of the garden, though he has shown to us the animals living there in amity and peace among themselves, there is no reality of kinship between them and man. They were created for man’s enjoyment; man was their lord and master. ……Not that India denied the superiority of man, but the test of that superiority lay, according to her, in the comprehensiveness of sympathy, not in the aloofness of absolute distinction.”
“India holds sacred, and counts as places of pilgrimage, all spots which display a special beauty or splendour of nature. These had no original attraction on account of any special fitness for cultivation or settlement. Here, man is free, not to look upon Nature as a source of supply of his necessities, but to realise his soul beyond himself. The Himalayas of India are sacred and the Vindhya Hills. Her majestic rivers are sacred. Lake Manasa and the confluence of the Ganges and the Jamuna are sacred.”
“…. we passed by the red and barren rocks of Arabia on our right side and the gleaming sands of Egypt on our left. There was an immense stretch of silence on the left shore as well as on the right, but the two shores spoke to me of the two different historical dramas enacted. The civilisation which found its growth in Egypt was continued across long centuries, elaborately rich with sentiments and expressions of life, with pictures, sculptures, temples, and ceremonials. ….There man never raised the barrier of alienation between himself and the rest of the world.
“On the opposite shore of the Red Sea the civilisation which grew up in the inhospitable soil of Arabia had a contrary character to that of Egypt. There man felt himself isolated in his hostile and bare surroundings. His idea of God became that of a jealous God. His mind naturally dwelt upon the principle of separateness. It roused in him the spirit of fight, and this spirit was a force that drove him far and wide. These two civilisations represented two fundamental divisions of human nature. The one contained in it the spirit of conquest and the other the spirit of harmony. And both of these have their truth and purpose in human existence.” (italics added)
Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka was a peasant who lived in the moment, without bondage to the knowledge of the pasts or of the future. It was enough for him to learn from ‘do nothing’ farming, as he called it. His concise 99 page One Straw Revolution was in my hands in 1982, when my fertile young mind was not at all able to understand Fukuoka’s unified view of life. ‘Natural farming’ seemed fairly obvious then, as agriculture was not the wasteland that it is today, and environmental thinking was yet in the womb of my future. It was Fukuoka’s simple sophistication that attracted my deeply held peasant traditions.
Since I commenced farming in 2012, some of Fukuoka’s natural farming view has become an integral part of my doing, as has Albert Howard’s knowledge of Indian farming and the ways of the local peasants who have worked the soil with me. Over April 2020, I had a wonderful opportunity to slowly unfold the wisdom of Fukuoka’s masterpiece during the times of Corona, while making weekly visits to the farm and seeing the land afresh with this insight. I realised once again how little I know about Krishi, and how I was not really ready for absorbing One Straw Revolution‘s wisdom any time before now. The limits of human knowledge and the impact of sustained human intervention on the natural ways hold new meaning today, when we hide in fear from the results of our own actions.
One Straw Revolution has a lot to share with those willing to listen. Larry Korn lived for 2 years on Fukuoka’s farm in Japan, here he speaks to us in a 2016 documentary. You can also watch him in a series of three YouTube videos posted after his passing in 2019:
“People associate natural farming with a technique. It’s not the technique, it’s the view. Once you have that view … you enter into nature and participate from the inside instead of as a visitor from the outside, then you’ll know exactly what to do … a lot of it depends on trial and error, that you try something and see how nature responds, and that helps you to move along to figure out what to do. …… The idea of observation from the natural farming point of view, is more of an interaction. You are not observing, you are actually living in nature and you are getting to know your place. … you become so intimately connected with a place that it becomes an extension of yourself. Mr. Fukuoka believes that natural farming proceeds from the spiritual health of the individual. He considers the healing of the land and the purification of the human spirit to be one process, and he proposes a way of life and a way of farming in which this process can take place.”
Fukuoka’s thinking on farming was revolutionary. He nevertheless was not only about farming, and lived an integrated life in nature as a beacon to the world. On agriculture, he simultaneously discarded the accumulated debris of farming methods of ancient civilisations based on ploughing and monoculture crops, and Western ‘scientific’ methods of ever increasing production simply for food through the use of a vast range and quantities of humanmade chemicals.
“I was aiming at a pleasant, natural way of farming which results in making the work easier instead of harder. ‘How about not doing this? How about not doing that?’ that was my way of thinking. I ultimately reached the conclusion that there was no need to plough, no need to apply fertiliser, no need to make compost, no need to use insecticide. When you get right down to it, there are few agricultural practices that are really necessary.”
Fukuoka’s thinking aligns with Gandhi’s practice of living a life of subsistence, indeed of self-imposed poverty. He poses the simple question ‘how should we live correctly on this earth?’ His answers aren’t complex either – live a life without wants, live off what your quarter acre of land feeds you.
“On the ridge top of the orchard, overlooking Matsuyama Bay and the broad Dogo Plain, are several small, mud walled huts. There, a handful of people have gathered and are living a simple life together. There are no modern conveniences. Spending peaceful evenings beneath candle and lamplight, they live a life of simple necessities: brown rice, vegetables, a robe and a bowl. They come from somewhere, stay for a while, and then move on.”
“Extravagance of desire is the fundamental cause, which has led the world into its present predicament. Fast rather than slow, more rather than less – this flashy ‘development’ is linked directly to society’s impending collapse. It has only served to separate man from nature. Humanity must stop indulging the desire for material possessions and personal gain and move instead toward spiritual awareness. Agriculture must change from large mechanical operations to small farms attached only to life itself. Material life and diet should be given a simple place. If this is done, work becomes pleasant, and spiritual breathing space becomes plentiful. The more the farmer increases the scale of his operation, the more his body and spirit are dissipated and the further he falls away from a spiritually satisfying life.”
“Why do you have to develop? If economic growth rises from 5% to 10%, is happiness going to double? What’s wrong with a growth rate of 0%? Isn’t this a rather stable kind of economics? Could there be anything better than living simply and taking it easy? …..For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities.”
His Buddhist faith defined his belief in the interconnectedness of all life, and of living. In addition, his knowledge of the impermanence of life led to his living in the present. I hear him saying we have whatever is required to live a full life within nature. Be still, be in the moment, why run around everywhere seeking and accumulating knowledge.
“‘Right Food, Right Action, Right Awareness.’ The three cannot be separated from one another. If one is missing, none can be realised. If one is realised, all are realised.”
“Similarly, it would be well if people stopped troubling themselves about discovering the ‘true meaning of life’ we can never know the answers to great spiritual questions, it’s all right not to understand. We have been born and are living on the earth to face directly the reality of living. Just to live here and now – this is the true basis of human life.”
“If you expect a bright world on the other side of the tunnel, the darkness of the tunnel lasts all the longer. When you no longer want to eat something tasty, you can taste the real flavour of whatever you are eating.”
Along with simple thinking, he held grounded views on nutrition, commercial farming and consumers. Everyone is confused, so everything is confused.
“In general, commercial agriculture is an unstable proposition. The farmer would do much better by growing the food he needs without thinking about making money. If you plant one grain of rice, it becomes more than one thousand grains. ….If you follow this line of thought, you will have enough to eat, more than enough, without struggling. But if you decide to try to make money instead, you get on board the profit wagon, and it runs away with you.”
“In olden times …..Agriculture was said to be closer to the source of things than trade or manufacturing, and the farmer was said to be ‘the cupbearer of the gods.’ But now there is all this commotion about making money. Ultra-fashionable produce such as grapes, tomatoes, and melons are being grown. Flowers and fruit are being produced out-of-season in hothouses. Fish breeding has been introduced and cattle are raised because profits are high. This pattern shows clearly what happens when farming climbs aboard the economic roller coaster. Fluctuations in prices are violent. There are profits, but there are losses as well. Failure is inevitable. Japanese agriculture has lost sight of its direction ….It has strayed away from the basic principles of agriculture and has become a business.”
“Consumers generally assume that they have nothing to do with causing agricultural pollution. Many of them ask for food that has not been chemically treated. But chemically treated food is marketed mainly in response to the preferences of the consumer. The consumer demands large, shiny, unblemished produce of regular shape. To satisfy these desires, agricultural chemicals that were not used five or six years ago have come rapidly into use. The consumer’s willingness to pay high prices for food produced out of season has also contributed to the increased use of artificial growing methods and chemicals. …. But if you ask how important it is for human beings to have this fruit a month earlier, the truth is that it is not important at all, and money is not the only price paid for such indulgence.”
Fukuoka was an early advocate of plant foods, as he saw the simultaneous destruction of human health and waste of land resources as his predominantly cereal-vegetables eating Japanese society adopted the excessive meat-eating and unseasonable ways of the West. He could see the excesses of modernity in industrialising and globalising Japan in a world where a minority eats all possible kinds of food all year long, and many don’t have any food to eat. He was not an advocate of ideological vegetarianism, and believed all can eat what they want in tune with nature, but not to feed our desires.
“If 1,300 pounds of rice and 1,300 pounds of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field such as one of these, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labour per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. Meat and other imported foods are luxuries because they require more energy and resources than the traditional vegetables and grains produced locally. It follows that people who limit themselves to a simple local diet need do less work and use less land than those with an appetite for luxury.”
“If we do have a food crisis, it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature’s productive power, but by the extravagance of human desire.”
Fukuoka foresaw the epidemic of the simultaneous fracture with nature and unrestrained eating and living in rich nations, as well as in elites of poor nations, that today cause most of their lifestyle diseases: speed, stress, obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, cancer. Medical and nutritional ‘science’ look only at health as a combination of individual elements of food – fat, proteins, carbohydrates, other nutrients – known to science even if they are out of step with nature. If a vast majority of humans in wealthy societies no longer grow their own food, or connect with natural life, then unnatural food will give rise to unnatural diseases of lifestyle.
“Sickness comes when people draw apart from nature. The severity of the disease is directly proportional to the degree of separation. If a sick person returns to a healthy environment, often the disease will disappear. When alienation from nature becomes extreme, the number of sick people increases.”
“Not too long ago the daily meal of the farmers in this area consisted of rice and barley with miso and pickled vegetables. This diet gave long life, a strong constitution, and good health. Stewed vegetables and steamed rice with red beans was a once-a-month feast. The farmer’s healthy, robust body was able to nourish itself well on this simple rice diet. The traditional brown rice-and-vegetable diet of the East is very different from that of most Western societies. Western nutritional science believes that unless certain amounts of starch, fat, protein, minerals, and vitamins are eaten each day, a well-balanced diet and good health cannot be preserved.”
“One might suppose that Western dietetics, with its elaborate theories and calculations, could leave no doubts about proper diet. The fact is it creates far more problems than it resolves. One problem is that in Western nutritional science there is no effort to adjust the diet to the natural cycle. The diet that results serves to isolate human beings from nature. A fear of nature and a general sense of insecurity are often the unfortunate results.”
“If the Western scientific diet were put into practice on a wide scale, what sort of practical problems do you suppose would occur? High quality beef, eggs, milk, vegetables, bread, and other foods would have to be readily available all year around. Large-scale production and long-term storage would become necessary. Already in Japan, adoption of this diet has caused farmers to produce summer vegetables such as lettuce, cucumbers, eggplants, and tomatoes in the winter.”
“It is unreasonable to expect that a wholesome, balanced diet can be achieved simply by supplying a great variety of foods regardless of the season. Compared with plants that ripen naturally, vegetables and fruits grown out-of-season under necessarily unnatural conditions contain few vitamins and minerals. It is not surprising that summer vegetables grown in the autumn or winter have none of the flavour and fragrance of those grown beneath the sun by organic and natural methods.”
Organic farming methods and produce are meant to feed the body in a healthy manner, while Fukuoka’s natural farming is living on the land without objective. It just is. Healthy food, health of the human species, of all other living beings and the planet, is a by-product of this living in nature.
“Organic farming … was a system that emphasised the fundamental importance of compost and of recycling human and animal waste. The form of management was intensive and included such practices as crop rotation, companion planting, and the use of green manure. Since space was limited, fields were never left untended and the planting and harvesting schedules proceeded with precision. All organic residues were made into compost and returned to the fields. I went on to say that among natural farming methods two kinds could be distinguished: broad, transcendent natural farming, and the narrow natural farming of the relative world (as understood by the intellect) If I were pressed to talk about it in Buddhist terms, the two could be called … Mahayana and Hinayana natural farming.”
“Broad, Mahayana natural farming arises of itself when a unity exists between man and nature. It conforms to nature as it is, and to the mind as it is. It proceeds from the conviction that if the individual temporarily abandons human will and so allows himself to be guided by nature, nature responds by providing everything. Narrow natural farming, on the other hand, is pursuing the way of nature; it self-consciously attempts, by ‘organic’ or other methods, to follow nature. Farming is used for achieving a given objective. Although sincerely loving nature and earnestly proposing to her, the relationship is still tentative. Modern industrial farming desires heaven’s wisdom, without grasping its meaning, and at the same time wants to make use of nature. Restlessly searching, it is unable to find anyone to propose to.”
“The more people do, the more society develops, and the more problems arise. The increasing desolation of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the uneasiness and disintegration of the human spirit, all have been brought about by humanity’s trying to accomplish something. Originally, there was no reason to progress, and nothing that had to be done. We have come to the point at which there is no other way than to bring about a ‘movement’ not to bring anything about.”
In his prime in 1975 when he wrote One Straw Revolution, with three decades of a natural farming life behind him, Fukuoka was seen even in his country as an eccentric and extinct product of an ancient Japanese sensibility. He is forgotten today in the land of his birth, and Japanese society continues to make the yet-wrenching transition to a West-defined, globalised economy. However, his insights into farming, food, nature and living remain as deep as they were simple. Fukuoka remained sceptical of human intellect, science, and knowledge which is the very basis of modern society.
“People think they understand things because they become familiar with them. This is only superficial knowledge. It is the knowledge of the astronomer who knows the names of the stars, the botanist who knows the classification of the leaves and flowers, the artist who knows the aesthetics of green and red. This is not to know nature itself – the earth and sky, green and red. Astronomer, botanist, and artist have done no more than grasp impressions and interpret them, each within the vault of his own mind. The more involved they become with the activity of the intellect, the more they set themselves apart and the more difficult it becomes to live naturally.”
“People think that life is joy and death is sadness, but the rice seed, lying within the earth and sending out shoots in spring, its leaves and stems withering in the fall, still holds within its tiny core the full joy of life. The joy of life does not depart in death. Death is no more than a momentary passing. Wouldn’t you say that this rice, because it possesses the full joyousness of life, does not know the sorrow of death?”
“In nature, there is life and death, and nature is joyful. In human society, there is life and death, and people live in sorrow.
Fukuoka was not enamoured of environmentalists who he saw as reactionaries, nor was he fond of scientists (of which he was one in his youth) who were too specialised to see the whole.
“To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the center. At the same time, a centripetal effect asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises. But if people merely become caught up in reacting, moving to the left or to the right, depending on conditions, the result is only more activity. The non-moving point of origin, which lies outside the realm of relativity, is passed over, unnoticed. I believe that even ‘returning-to-nature’ and anti-pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the over development of the present age.”
” ‘Within one thing lie all things, but if all things are brought together not one thing can arise.’ Western science is unable to grasp this precept of eastern philosophy. A person can analyse and investigate a butterfly as far as he likes, but he cannot make a butterfly.”
“Scientists think they can understand nature. …Because they are convinced that they can understand nature, they are committed to investigating nature and putting it to use. However, I think an understanding of nature lies beyond the reach of human intelligence.”
Fukuoka mused about the need of a coming together of the world to first understand the problem together. His practice blazed a path for all of us to spy the solutions.
“Lately I have been thinking that the point must be reached when scientists, politicians, artists, philosophers, men of religion, and all those who work in the fields should gather here, gaze out over these fields, and talk things over together. I think this is the kind of thing that must happen if people are to see beyond their specialties.”
 See related words Middle English Acre, Aker. Old English æcer a field, land, that which is sown, cultivated land, land which a yoke of oxen could plough in a day. Latin agre, ager field, land countryside. Sanskrit अज्र, ajra. field or plain or open country. Greek agros field. Proto Indo-European root of agro is ag or ‘to drive, draw out or forth, move’. Sanskrit अजति ajati means to drive, propel, throw, cast or impel.
 The destruction Indians have wrought on nature since the writing of this essay in 1922 is extensive and mocks India’s belief in unity with nature. This is entirely due to our adoption of the Western ideal of the superiority of man, and the free expansion of our population, the ‘demographic dividend’..
 All extracts from this point on are taken from Fukuoka’s 1975 book One Straw Revolution, translated to English in 1978 by the efforts of Larry Korn. Here is a video on one of Fukuoka’s many visits to India later in life.
 Fukuoka’s take on Buddh’s Arya Ashtangaika Marg: Proper Vision, Proper Aims or Intention, Proper Speech, Proper Action or Conduct, Proper Livelihood, Proper Thoughts, Proper Awareness or Mindfulness and Proper Meditation.