Masanobu Fukuoka, a microbiologist who specialised in plant diseases, left his day job at the age of 25 and returned to his home farm on the island of Shikoku in Japan, where he practised natural farming, or ‘do-nothing’ farming, for fifty years.
His first book, The One-Straw Revolution, was published in 1977 and is about to be republished. Fukuoka considered the healing of the land and the healing of the human spirit to be one and the same. In his writings, he proposes a way of life, in which farming is one part, as a way to facilitate the healing process.
Just the antidote for one who’s been a little smug about managing to get a little patch of grass topdressed in time for the rains this year. I suppose Fukuoka has been practising Zen gardening, how soothing and liberating for the ego that will follow one, even into the garden.