Listen: Nature’s both the mother who births you and the
teacher who’ll slap your hand when you reach for the hot stove. Right and
wrong, good and evil, beauty and ugliness—hell, even love and hate—they all
turn to smoke and shadows once you step off the path she’s laid down for you.
Always has been that way. Always will be.
You’d think those words came from some old hermit living in
a shack, talking to the trees. But you’d be wrong, Constant Reader. Dead wrong.
The man who wrote them—Masanobu Fukuoka—started his journey
in a place about as far from God’s green earth as you could get: a laboratory.
White walls. Microscopes. The smell of chemicals that’d make your eyes water.
He buried that particular truth in an essay called “Nature
Creates God,” tucked away in his book The Road Back to Nature: Regaining the
Paradise Lost, published in 1989. And he wasn’t just talking about how to
grow rice or wheat—no sir. He was talking about the sickness eating away at
modern humanity’s soul. The cancer we all pretend isn’t there.
See, Fukuoka figured that modern people had lost their way
because they were too damn busy trying to prove they were better than
everything else. Smarter. More important. They wanted to be kings of the whole
goddamn universe. And industrial agriculture—with its poison sprays and
chemical fertilizers and machines that raped the earth—that was just humanity’s
way of beating nature into submission. Making her scream uncle.
When Fukuoka saw what that arrogance had done—the
destruction, the waste, the sheer wrongness of it all—he walked away.
Just like that. He quit his job studying bugs under a microscope and went back
to the land. Because he understood something most people don’t: only by
admitting that nature knows better could humanity find its way back to the
paradise it had lost.
Before he became a farmer, before he found his truth,
Fukuoka was a plant pathologist. Starting in 1934, he worked at the Yokohama
Customs Office, studying fungal cultures and crossbreeding disease-resistant
plants. Good work. Important work. The kind of work that should’ve satisfied a
man.
But it didn’t.
He’d stare into his microscope at the tiny world squirming
there, and sometimes—just sometimes—it felt like he was looking at the universe
itself. But that feeling never lasted. It was like cotton candy: sweet for a
moment, then gone, leaving nothing but a vague sense of disappointment and the
taste of sugar on your tongue.
The real turning point—the moment when everything
changed—came in 1937. Fukuoka was twenty-five years old, and he collapsed.
Acute pneumonia. The kind that makes you think you might be punching your
ticket for that great laboratory in the sky.
Lying in that hospital bed, alone with his thoughts and his
fever dreams, questions about life and death crawled through his brain like
beetles. They burrowed deep, and they didn’t let go.
Even after his body healed, his mind stayed broken.
Then one night—it was just before May 15—Fukuoka collapsed
on a hill beneath a large tree. When he woke up at dawn, he had his revelation.
His burning bush moment. His Damascus road.
“In this world,” he realized, “nothing at all exists.”
In The One-Straw Revolution, he put it this way: “Humanity
knows absolutely nothing. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every
action is futile and meaningless.”
Now, that might sound like despair talking. Like a man who’d
given up. But it wasn’t. That awareness of nothingness became the bedrock of
Fukuoka’s truth. It tore down the wall between him and nature, brick by brick,
until there was nothing left but clear air.
If all human efforts to conquer the world are ultimately
pointless—and they are, friends, they surely are—then the only way forward is
to stop fighting. Stop scheming. Stop pretending you’re God. For Fukuoka,
farming wasn’t about wringing every last drop of production from the soil. It
was a spiritual practice. A kind of prayer.
The day after his enlightenment, he quit his job. Just
walked away from that laboratory and never looked back. He went to Shikoku
Island and started farming on his father’s land.
He called it “do-nothing farming.” Let the trees grow wild.
Let nature do her thing without human hands constantly meddling and fixing and improving.
His first attempts failed. Failed hard. The branches
grew into a tangled mess that’d make you think of Medusa’s hair. Pests swarmed
like something out of Exodus. The family’s citrus trees—heritage trees, mind
you, trees that’d been producing for generations—withered and died.
His father kicked him out.
So Fukuoka isolated himself on a hill and kept trying. And
that’s when he learned the hard truth: restoring nature’s purity wasn’t just
about doing nothing. You couldn’t just step back and expect everything to
magically fix itself. The soil had been damaged too long, its instincts beaten
out of it. You had to help it remember what it once knew.
“Nature,” he wrote later, “existed long before humans
appeared and is assumed to continue existing after humans disappear.”
Think about that for a minute. Let it sink in. We’re just
passengers on this train, folks. Not the conductor.
Year after year, Fukuoka refined his methods. His
stubbornness—some might call it obsession, and they might be right—eventually
paid off. He saved the family citrus orchard. More than that, he built
something new: a productive ecosystem where everything worked together like
instruments in an orchestra.
He practiced continuous cropping: rice in summer, wheat and
barley in winter. He’d scatter wheat and white clover seeds while the rice was
still ripening. After the rice harvest, he’d return the straw to the field as
mulch. Between the rows, he’d plant daikon radish, mustard greens, other
vegetables—let them grow half-wild, no chemicals needed.
At his peak, Fukuoka harvested about 22 bushels of wheat per
quarter-acre. That’s roughly 5.8 tons per hectare. He noted it matched the
highest yields in Ehime Prefecture, one of Japan’s most productive regions. Not
world-record stuff, but good enough to make people pay attention.
While Fukuoka was learning to surrender to nature, the rest
of the world was going the opposite direction. The 1950s brought the Green
Revolution—a massive transformation built on laboratory-engineered seeds,
synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and machines big enough to crush a man if he
got in the way.
And it worked, at least by the numbers. Global wheat yields
jumped from 1.09 tons per hectare in 1961 to over 3.52 tons in 2022. Norman
Borlaug, the man behind it, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Researchers estimated
that improved seeds boosted yields by 44% and delivered $83 trillion in
economic benefits.
Eighty-three trillion dollars.
But here’s the thing about numbers: they don’t tell you
about the cost. They don’t tell you what you’ve lost.
By 2022, 40% of the world’s land was degraded. The soil
fertility was shot. Natural vegetation was gone. Biodiversity had collapsed
like a house of cards in a stiff wind.
“Modern agriculture has changed the face of the planet more
than any other human activity,” said Ibrahim Thiaw of the UN Convention to
Combat Desertification. “We need to urgently rethink our global food systems,
which are responsible for 80% of deforestation, 70% of freshwater use, and the
single largest driver of terrestrial biodiversity loss.”
And there’s your paradox, friends. Harvest abundance built
on ecological poverty. A feast today paid for with famine tomorrow.
That’s where Fukuoka’s ideas matter.
The Green Revolution asked: “What else can we add to the
soil to get bigger yields?”
Fukuoka asked: “What else can I stop doing so nature can
work on its own?”
Addition versus subtraction. Control versus surrender.
Fukuoka’s natural farming rested on four principles, four “no’s”:
no tillage, no chemical fertilizers, no pesticides, no weeding. It came from
the belief that humans aren’t masters of everything. Our limited intellect—and
it is limited, no matter what we tell ourselves—disrupts nature’s
mechanisms, systems that took millions of years to perfect.
Unlike the Green Revolution’s obsession with output, the
main goal of Fukuoka’s natural farming wasn’t growing crops. It was cultivating
human beings. Perfecting the soul.
He wanted to prove that by admitting we know nothing, nature
would provide abundance. The absence of human intellect was the gateway to true
existence. Technological backwardness wasn’t a disaster—it was an opportunity
for the soil to breathe again.
Sure, Fukuoka’s approach has its critics. Questions about
scalability, about whether it works everywhere. But that misses the point. The
real value isn’t in the technical details—it’s in the worldview. The
philosophy.
In the end, Fukuoka understood what most people don’t:
humans aren’t the center of everything. In The Road Back to Nature, he
wrote something that cuts right to the heart of our arrogance:
“That sparrow, that dog, and that ginkgo tree have no reason
to look up to humans. On the contrary, it’s humans who should occasionally bow
in respect, because in reality, they are far superior.”
Superior.
Think about that the next time you’re tempted to believe you’re
the master of the universe. Think about it when you’re standing in your yard
with your pesticides and your fertilizers, trying to force the earth to bend to
your will.
Nature was here first, friends. And she’ll be here long
after we’re gone.
That’s the truth.
And the truth, as they say, will set you free.
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