In many years of gardening, as well as writing about and teaching classes on horticulture, I’ve always attempted to incorporate self sufficiency and permaculture techniques.
I am deeply indebted to the knowledge and skill of those who have come before me, especially one of the earliest and most revolutionary proponents of self-sufficient, natural and permaculture farming practices, the late Masanobu Fukuoka. There have been many good books written on the topic, but in my opinion, none as straight forward, simple and engaging as The One-Straw Revolution.The following is from the back jacket of my copy:
“Few books written in our soulless times have succeeded in transforming people’s minds as completely as Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution.””Struck by the manner in which modern agriculture and its methods were destroying the soil, Fukuoka opted out of his technical career (he had been trained as an agricultural scientist) and returned to his village home. Here he resumed traditional farming and refined it so that his methods required less labour and minimal disruption of nature. His techniques helped generate crop yields as good as those on neighboring fields mutilated by tractors and heavily dosed with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.””In The One- Straw Revolution, Fukuoka – today considered one of the most outstanding organic farmers of our century – describes the events that led to the development of his natural farming methods and the impact these have had on his land, on himself and on the thousands of people who have learnt from his technique. In the process, he has left the very foundations of modern agriculture in splendid disarray.””Fukuoka demonstrates how the way we look at farming influences the way we look at health, the school, nature, nutrition, spiritual health and life itself. He joins the healing of the land to the process of purifying the human spirit and proposes a way of life and a way of farming in which healing can take place.””This book – an all time classic – is a clarion call to all of us to abandon modern agriculture and its destructive methods and poisons, and to return to our far richer heritage of working closely and simply with the land.”