Harry Eyres

Society

We reap what we have sown

When a friend lent me his copy of Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution (republished last year by the New York Review of Books), I was struck by one sentence in particular. Somewhere in the middle of this charming, eccentric book, one of the founding texts of natural, non-interventionist farming, Fukuoka asserts that “the one-acre farmer of long ago spent January, February and March hunting rabbits in the hills”. Later on, he says that while cleaning his village shrine he found dozens of haikus, composed by local people, on hanging plaques; but “there is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song”.

September 3, 2010

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