Masanobu Fukuoka Quotes

Unless people can become natural people, there can be neither natural farming nor natural food.

I'm a farmer now, and it's fantastic. My goal is to be totally self-sufficient and grow everything that I eat. There's something about earning your dinner that's cool.

Natural farming is just farming, nothing more. You don't have to be a spiritually oriented person to practice my methods.

Of course, I prefer organic farming to chemical-dependent farming, but sometimes absolutist organic prescriptions go too far. I don't even rule out the possibility of genetic modification generating some benign ideas, as long as we can keep them away from monopolists such as Monsanto.

The real path to natural farming requires that a person know what unaltered nature is, so that he or she can instinctively understand what needs to be done - and what must not be done - to work in harmony with its processes.

Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.

Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it's never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives.

It's become more readily apparent that we need to be growing our own food and growing more things organically.

An orchard can grow pastured poultry underneath. A beef cattle or sheep farm can run pastured poultry behind the herbivores, like the egret on the rhino's nose.

I'm not a Luddite, but I'm outside more than I'm on my computer. We have a micro-farm - it's a step up from a garden. We have a pretty extensive vineyard. We grow about 60 percent of our own food, make our own wine, have chickens for eggs.

Maybe we need to re-engage our smart, energetic youth around the world to be farmers and find fresh, green technologies that will feed the world more fresh greens.

There's something great about the idea of working the land and living communally. That's healthy. That's good.

By having a direct stake and involvement with the process of plants growing, of having your hands in the soil and tending it carefully and with love, your world and everyone's else's world too, becomes a better place.

Permacultures - where you use the immediate environment to grow food - should be mandatory.

Farmers, young and old, educated and uneducated, have easily taken to the new agronomy. It has been heart-warming to see young college graduates, retired officials, ex-armymen, illiterate peasants and small farmers queuing up to get the new seeds.

That's what I want to do when I finish fighting - build urban farms and learn how to become a farmer, because that's what I wanted to be when I was a little girl.

While some livestock farms are much better than others, there are none in this country that look like natural ecosystems. Nature has no fences.

The best farming systems are ones where animals and plants are put into a synergistic relationship.

Our agricultural colleges continue to graduate specialists who become vocational agricultural teachers in the schools, and county agents, who go forth to extol the virtues of poison insecticides, herbicides, and commercial fertilizers.

A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather than change the earth to suit a crop... it would diversify its crops to suit the earth

Encountering sufferings will definitely contribute to the elevation of your spiritual practice, provided you are able to transform calamity and misfortune into the path.

With wrong farming methods, we turn fertile land into desert. Unless we go back to organic farming and save the soil, there is no future.

I started natural farming after the war with just one small plot, but gradually I acquired additional acreage by taking over surrounding pieces of abandoned land and caring for them by hand.

By growing a spiritual practice, we are given all that we need.

I have a spiritual practice which helps to keep me grounded and centered.