The One-Straw Revolution shifts in tone and scope during its brisk 185 pages. Almost as important, he restores a lost balance to his life as a farmer: he has months of free time away from the fields, during which he can compose poetry and be in nature, rather than tied to trying to master it. His rice yields skyrocket and his Mandarin oranges, grown without intervention, fetch the highest prices at market. After a few disasters, he restores a natural balance to his fields. Literally.įukuoka espouses a philosophy of what he calls “do-nothing” farming, arguing against weeding, fertilization, pesticides, composting and cultivation, and arguing for humans to watch nature, learn her rhythm and then synchronize their farming with it.

He returned to the plot of farmland he was raised on in the mountains of Shikoku, in southern Japan, and set out to do nothing. He hung up his lab coat (he had been an agricultural inspector for the Japanese government) and left his cosmopolitan life behind. In the book, Fukuoka tells the story of his life after he had a revelation in his 20s that human knowledge is worthless and, specifically, that the agricultural application of that “knowledge” is destructive. The prices that used copies fetch on the Internet also seem to mark it as something widely sought after. I had never heard of it before I saw an ad for the reprint in The New York Review of Books, though a blurb on the book’s back cover by Pollan, an introduction by Frances Moore Lappé and a preface by Wendell Berry (the three make up a formidable trident of Food Righteousness) all assert the influence the book had when it was first published in the late 1970s. One of those lost books was reissued this summer by the New York Review of Books Classics imprint, a handsome little tome called The One-Straw Revolution by a Japanese rice farmer named Masanobu Fukuoka. (At least those written by Michael Pollan.) And with the resurrection of an old French-cooking warhorse to the best-seller list, I’m hoping we’re entering an age of rediscovery, where long-neglected books-books that have been more “influential” than, you know, actually read-will begin reappearing in bookstores and on nightstands.

Prescriptive books about agriculture, how to eat and how to think about food seem more and more popular these days.

The straw revolution