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Comment by conjecTech | Hacker News Reader

For those of you who found this interesting and wish to know more, I would very heavily recommend you research permaculture and particularly check out some of the videos made by Geoff Lawton, which are extremely informative and entertaining. There is also a fantastic documentary case study of similar techniques being used by a farmer named Sepp Holzer on his farm the Krameterhof in Austria, though I don't remember the name. It was compelling enough to persuade a 16 year-old me to dig up about an acre of the hard red clay in my back yard and try to create a self sustaining food forest.

Slightly more on topic, I'm very glad to see people trying to make a business out of these techniques and I wish the people at Aforestt all the best.

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Agreed. Fukuoka's classic The One Straw Revolution is also excellent reading. He was a trained biologist who then moved toward a more holistic and philosophically based approach to land management, reaping huge benefits. You can view his work as agricultural process hacking. His five principles:

(1) human cultivation of soil, plowing or tilling are unnecessary, as is the use of powered machines

(2) prepared fertilizers are unnecessary, as is the process of preparing compost

(3) weeding, either by cultivation or by herbicides, is unnecessary. Instead only minimal weed suppression with minimal disturbance

(4) applications of pesticides or herbicides are unnecessary

(5) pruning of fruit trees is unnecessary

Occasionally, when we're really busy with non-gardening tasks during the summer, we follow these "principles" by default. No vegetables other than the tomatoes end up producing. And actually most years even the tomatoes require something for the hornworms, although we've had some success with the Bacillus thuringiensis spray.

There must be more to this method than just not doing anything in the garden.

EDIT: OK, I'll read this book. I have to ask: have you, or anyone you know personally, managed to grow useful plants from seed without cultivating, fertilizing, weeding, or pruning?

I believe the source of your concern here is a misunderstanding. The points are principles by which to develop a locally sustainable method, rather than the method itself.

For instance, Fukuoka makes it clear that for effective pest control in particular, certain patterns of planting are critical to a encourage healthy insect biology that will protect the plants from devastating pest invasions. He also emphasizes that trial and error combined with observation are the most important considerations, and that one should draw initially from local seed stock and local established plantings. This will result in better results with less effort, ie. a superior process.

Of course none of that is strictly necessary. Plants grew for millions of years without anybody planting them, they can still grow.

That said, plowing and fertilizing are used to improve a terrain. Without those, you'll get a much lower yield. Their effects will last for several years, so one can get good results for some time without using them, but they are far from unnecessary. Human population was too big to sustain on Earth without those techniques milenia ago. Weeding is useless for some crops, actually damaging for others, but essential for some. Pesticides and herbicides too often do more harm than good, but are almost unavoidable on some cases. And pruning makes trees have the shape you want, what has a deep economical impact.

It's true that the agriculture overuses some techniques, but alternative agro proponents are often radicals that really don't deserve to be listened.

{{citation-needed}} on 90% of that.

However, I believe you are limiting your scope of thought by considering crop yield per unit of land as a measure of success.

Fukuoka by contrast considered the bigger picture, mainly the cost and reliability (ie. overall risk introduced by) all inputs to the agricultural process, but also the quality of the resulting crop. In his particular case, in a situation in which labour-intensive traditional Japanese agricultural processes were being replaced by western machinery, fertilizer and pesticide companies, he achieved excellent fruit yields with greater self-sufficiency, less risk and less effort than competing approaches. He also found that consumers appreciated his crops more, finding them tastier (qualitative improvement) and offering to pay higher prices.

You are of course correct that pruning is necessary for some types of crops, however Fukuoka worked primarily with fruit trees on his family farm and in his principles stated only that pruning was unnecessary for fruit tree agriculture, ie. this is a straw man argument.

Your final incitement to a mindset of dismission is unenlightened.

Do keep in mind that food prices are murderously high in Japan, which is a very real problem for low-income families.

One single apple at my local supermarket is $2 and up. A head of flavorless lettuce costs the same. The Japanese equivalent to "beans and rice" is instant noodles, because both rice and legumes of any kind are pricy.

It gets better outside of major cities, but food prices here are insane.

Fukuoka lived in postwar rural Japan, not post-bubble modern Japan. It's very true the economy is different. However, this fact really reinforces his point that depending on money to acquire inputs to your agricultural process is a big risk and unneeded complexity for the small scale farmer... hence, his success and book.

You fail to realize that the agro business model does achieve higher yields in the short term at the cost of soil damaging in the long term. As the natural biodiversity in both soils and seeds decrease, the risk of catastrophic pest swapping large number of crops grows and over-reliance on chemicals becomes a given.

We certainly need modern agriculture as a transitional technology to keep feeding the 7+ billion people on Earth today, but if this does not come hand in hand with measures to drastically reduce fertility rates (and per capita consumption, but that's another story) it means little more than kicking the can down the road. After all, the most important reason we are facing this dilemma today is that our parents' generation faced the same challenge when we were 4+ billion and decided to pretend there's nothing wrong with it.

Your choice of labeling alternative agro proponents as "radicals" because they cannot avoid calling a spade a spade tells more about the willful ignorance of society on these matters than about any objective measure of character of the label's subjects. And you surely know that problems cannot be made to go away by shutting eyes and ears, do you?

My father who is from a small village in India was pretty inspired by the book review of this article and then ordered the translation and tried out many of these techniques.

Even though I agree with the above summary it is not necessarily that simplistic. But turns out that relying more on nature instead of using too many artificial manipulators does have several benefits.

A bit late, but thanks for mentioning this. I just finish reading it. I hadn't heard of it previously, and it was well worth the time.

Yes! For those interested in a DIY project, I would add that "Permaculture: A Designer's Manual" [0] is arguably the reference for these techniques.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Permaculture-Designers-Manual-Bill-Mol...

Just in case you're still working on your acre of hard red clay, try using the ancient technique of terra preta. This is what the natives in the amazon used to create incredibly fertile soil in the horrible red clay amazonian soil.

Indeed. Also, definitely Bill Mollison (Geoff's teacher). I studied with both of them in the AU, and they have done amazing work in agriculture.

Note that Mollison was inspired by Fukuoka.

Fukuoka, the city in Japan?

Based on someone mentioning his book, I'm thinking Masanobu Fukuoka: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka

Thank you, didn't catch that in the other comments.

Lucky you! I studied under someone who studied with Bill, but never had the chance to meet him.

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