Natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy by Masanobu Fukuoka

Fukuoka is famous in India, where his techniques are being used to revive desert areas. His keen observations of, and communion with nature, ultimately created, over the years, a natural farming technique requiring no machinery (no ploughing or digging, ever!) or fossil fuel, no chemicals, no prepared compost and very little weeding. Yields are comparable to the most productive farms. Natural farming creates no pollution and the fertility of the fields improves with each season. He calls it "do-nothing farming" but it is more like "do-little" (harvesting is the most laborious part of the year). Here, the author continues his critique of scientific farming practices, explaining why they can never succeed, and of how our belief that we know better than nature inevitably separates us more and more from everything, including ourselves and each other. Fukuoka explains that scientific farming attempts to correct and improve on what it perceives as the shortcomings of nature through human effort. Scientific experiments always take a single subject and apply a number of variable conditions to it while making some prior assumption about the results.