Natural Farming

Natural farming, also called the Fukuoka Method, the natural way of farming or do-nothing farming, is an ecological farming approach created by the Japanese farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka, who introduced the concept in his 1975 book The One-Straw Revolution. Its name emphasizes the avoidance of manufactured inputs and equipment rather than an absence of effort, and it connects to fertility farming, organic farming, sustainable agriculture, agroecology, agroforestry, ecoagriculture and permaculture, though it is distinguished from biodynamic agriculture. Fukuoka developed the approach after observing farmers losing their sensitivity to the land following the post-war introduction of chemical agriculture, and after twenty five years his own farm achieved yields comparable to technologically advanced Japanese farms without the pollution, soil loss, energy consumption and environmental degradation of those modern methods.