On how to grow an idea

There were a couple of obvious differences between his field and the neighbours. First it was clear that he had a lot more wildlife in his field: frogs, insects and a lot more spiders. Second, the surrounding fields had been damaged by a typhoon that had come through, while his was in great condition. He surmised that it was because they were using a more modern variety that works better with the fertiliser schedule while he was forced to use an older variety that had a more coarse straw.

He grows all the rice for himself and his wife. His wife has another plot somewhere (that I didn't see) where she grows all the vegetables. They buy fish and meat, etc at the grocery store. He tends to trade a lot with the local orchards for fruit. I'm not entirely sure how much rice he grows -- probably about 3-400 kg. I think the normal yield of rice is about 2.2 kg per m^2 (someone has written an online tonne per hectare to kg per m^2 calculator...!)... which is 200 m^2 or 2100 sq ft, which is basically bang on the size of his field.

We harvested the entire field by hand (just with a little hand scythe). It took a weekend, but was surprisingly easy (we were not rushing in any way). I expected it to be "back breaking work", but it's not at all -- at least for such a small field. We were mostly just hanging out and chatting. I asked him how much work it was the rest of the year. He told me that it took him a day to prepare and plant the seed and that after that it was just about 30 minutes a week to water, etc.

After that he has to thresh the rice and polish it, but he uses machines for that and says that it isn't that much work.

At the very high supermarket prices for rice in Japan, it's probably just worth your time ($1000 worth of rice), but it might be difficult to justify the cost of labour if you were trying to do it commercially.

Of course Fukuoka's idea is that anybody can grow the bulk of their food in their spare time as a kind of light hobby. From what I can tell, that's totally doable. It certainly was an interesting experience for me. I have unfortunately lost track of my acquaintance, but I will be meeting a mutual friend soon, so I'm hoping to reconnect in the future.

So while there is no algorithm to produce ideas, you can consciously work on creating a surrounding in which they may develop 'by themselves'.

As I understand it, you tend to stay close to familiar concepts, while sometimes being open to new ones. As you revisit a concept, it gets reinforced, allowing you to comfortably spend more time there and opening you to a cluster of new concepts and ideas.

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180124123053.h...