One Farmer Really Close to the Soil

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD, LIKE OUR NEED FOR CLEAN AIR and water, should be a constant reminder that we are biological beings. But today, air is often filtered, warmed, cooled, or humidified in our homes, offices, and vehicles, and we consume far more liquid in various kinds of drinks than as just plain water. Every bit of our nutrition is plant or animal, yet people today have little appreciation of the biological nature of their food.

The meals we consume today seem disconnected from the Earth, where they originate. The farmer and writer Wendell Berry once told me that in North America, on average, food is consumed 3,200 kilometers (1,988 miles) from where it is produced. But because air, water, soil, and biodiversity are economic “externalities,” the ecological consequences of global trade are not reflected in the cost of food. When I inquired why New Zealand–grown rather than Ontario lamb was featured on the menu of a fancy restaurant north of Toronto, the answer was “It’s cheaper.” The true ecological cost of fresh fruit and vegetables in winter in a northern country like Canada is never revealed in their price.

For most of history, food was ingested close to where it grew. We ate locally and seasonally. Our severance from an immediate and intimate relationship with nutrition is a direct result of the disconnection from land that characterizes modern urban society. Food is one of the best ways to reassess the way we live.

In the farm community of Sakurai City in Nara prefecture, I encountered fifty-two-year-old Yoshikazu Kawaguchi, who practices a radically different kind of agriculture called natural farming. Kawaguchi begins with the understanding that nature is a complex community of living things that humans do not understand. Consequently, one or a few species of plants or insects can’t be defined as “good” or “bad” when we know so little about their roles in the entire ecosystem.

Kawaguchi doesn’t use chemical fertilizers or pesticides, and what’s more, unlike organic farmers, he does not till the soil. He lets the “weeds” that are competing with his crops grow, or when he does intrude, he cuts the plants above ground and leaves their tops on the earth.

Within the plant cover, onion shoots were poking through, and potatoes inserted into slits were sprouting roots. Wheat seeds are cast over the paddies and harvested in early June. Then rice is planted and harvested in November. Kawaguchi’s soil is sticky, black, and pungent with decaying vegetation, in contrast to his neighbor’s neat, plowed, and weedless furrows of gray dirt.

For twenty years, Kawaguchi was a typical farmer using chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Then, about twenty years ago, his family began to get sick repeatedly and he developed a life-threatening liver disorder. He happened to read a series of newspaper articles on complex pollution, which made him realize that his family’s health problems might be caused by the chemicals he was using. He then read The One Straw Revolution, a seminal work by Masanobu Fukuoka on natural farming, which prescribes sowing seeds onto unplowed ground. By following Fukuoka’s methods, Kawaguchi lost his entire rice crop in the first two seasons. But with tenacity and observation, he succeeded the third year. “I realized that natural farming methods are not fixed. The natural farmer should be constantly flexible and must learn intimately about soil, insects, and natural conditions of the area.”

Once he had changed methods, Kawaguchi looked at the world through different eyes: “It was only after I started natural farming that I felt happy to be a farmer. Before, I felt as if I was standing in a deadly world. My rice and vegetables were growing, but I watched insects dying in agony and my fields became silent places devoid of any other forms of life.”

Kawaguchi believes the increased wealth created by farming with machines and chemicals is an illusion. After paying for machinery, fuels, and the ever-increasing amount and variety of fertilizers and pesticides, much of the benefit of large-scale agriculture vanishes. Furthermore, the yields may be high, but Kawaguchi calls the food tasteless and devoid of adequate nutrition. And his most pointed criticism is that modern farming breaks apart the web of life and threatens people’s health.

For Kawaguchi, his farming methods have become a spiritual way of life. He has tried meditation and other forms of spiritual discipline, but he ultimately realized that farming is his vocation and that nature is his teacher. He told me, “We have been seeing other life-forms as our enemies. But if we see them as friends, it changes how we act. The more we learn about what’s happening in soil, the more we learn about life.”

That’s what is distinctive about natural farming. Instead of trying to impose a human agenda on nature, natural farmers know there is much that they still have to learn, so they try to let nature guide them. He says, “The land lets you live, the seasons give you the food from the land.” Kawaguchi recognizes that humans are no longer hunter-gatherers living by the dictates of nature. The very acts of collecting seeds and planting them, whether by mimicking nature and casting them on the ground or by using large machines and chemicals, are deliberate. “I cut plants competing too much with my crops,” he says without apology. “I select seeds too. I am a farmer, not a gatherer.” But he begins from an understanding that categories such as “weed,” “pest,” “good,” or “bad” are human definitions, not meaningful biological classifications.

We don’t know all of the constituents of soil, air, or water; nor do we understand how they interact or maintain the Earth’s productivity and resilience. Thus, one must begin with respect for the 3.5 billion years during which life evolved without human intervention. Protection of the integrity of the soil ecosystem and the air and water that nourish it is uppermost in the priorities of a natural farmer, because as long as they are maintained, so is human life. “We have to go along with nature, never try to impose our formula,” says Kawaguchi.

But farming in Japan, as in North America, has changed. “Enjoying nature is not part of mainstream farming. It has become an enterprise designed only to make a lot of money. Farmers are removed from the philosophy of raising life. It’s become totally scientific. So they are surrounded by nature, but they are also removed from it at the same time.” For Kawaguchi, science has been a major cause of this change:

Scientific western thinking puts man and nature in conflict. It says nature can’t do it properly without man. In natural farming, humans are seen to be a part of nature. The yield is smaller with natural farming, but the food is real; it has more life. It’s not artificially pumped up. You need less of it to live. The ideal situation is that you grow what you eat, [and] that you eat what is grown in your area.

Human knowledge is so limited. So real human knowledge must achieve a kind of sattori [enlightenment]. What science can find is part of something, but just a part…. Each organism has a wide range of activities, so you can’t just pull out one function; there are many more organisms than science knows, and each one is complete in its existence and part of a totality. So to find just one wonderful function of one organism and bring it into the field is just disrupting the harmony of the field.

Kawaguchi pointed out that most approaches to farming focus on one or two elements of numerous possibilities. Thus organic farming emphasizes natural fertilizers and no chemical pesticides, permaculture focuses on cultivating native species, and an approach called “effective microorganisms” uses soil microbes to counter oxidation, which breaks things down. But ultimately we have to pay attention to the whole complex of soil, air, and water and the balance of life within it. As Kawaguchi stresses, “The basic thing is to trust life and let it live in the natural world.”

He also predicts:

The scientific and technological society has been developed, but life is worsening. Yet the mainstream is still blind and rushing along. It’s certain this civilization has to collapse. Within this troubled world, a new civilization is already beginning. The new civilization that is sprouting is based on the value of life and chooses to live in harmony with the Earth.

We have to get rid of our obsession with death. We must let nature do its work and trust the body. When a crisis happens, we have to respond. We take a narrow view, but we have to be calm. We must accept our mortality, but do not give in to death by disease. By accepting death, this is the only way to accept life. If we try to escape death we are actually denying life. That state works against all life. By accepting death, then you can live. So when we are ill with disease, we must accept that but not give in.

We would do well to study the philosophy of natural farming. Most of us live in cities away from the primary production of food. But Kawaguchi’s reflections about farming inform us of a different way of seeing our place in nature, a way that might guide us into a balance with the things that make all life possible