The One-Straw Revolution - Multiworld India

squashes and other vegetable by dibbling. They did not even possess theplough. No wonder the Europeans found the soil rich and healthy evenafter 50,000 years of use by the Indians. Elsewhere on the samecontinent, where more civilized tribes used the plough, the soil hadturned to sand.In order to emphasize the long history and world spread of naturalfarming, I began to call it rishi kheti. I also hoped that this would preventit from being called Japanese kheti. Later, when I told Fukuoka this, heheartily endorsed rishi kheti. He said if Gandhiji were alive he wouldalso have blessed rishi kheti.As readers will soon discover, this book is not only about agriculture.It is concerned with the total lifestyle. Hence it devotes considerableattention to nutrition, health, science and technology and to simpleliving. More than all this Fukuoka emphasizes the spiritualunderpinnings of his idea.He shares his personal spiritual experience of being one day shakento the core by a realization that all the world was part of one central truth.We see duality and opposites because of ignorance. Therefore all ourknowledge based on observation of phenomena is really false andtherefore virtually useless. It is mainly to illustrate this insight thatFukuoka turned to farming. Step by step he abandoned 'necessary' taskscarried out by farmers and recommended by 'experts'. In the end heproduced just as good crops without digging, weeding, composting, andwithout using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. He thus proved that allour conventional knowledge of agriculture is not only worthless, butactually harmful because it has hurt the soil, weakened the plants andpoisoned the environment.Fukuoka describes his farming experiments in just enough detail tobe convincing and to be usefulxiv