Akwesasne Notes' review of One Straw Revolution

(From One Straw Revolutionary by Larry Korn)
APPENDIX B: Akwesasne Notes Review of The One-Straw Revolution (1978)

For countless generations, since the introduction of agriculture to the Eastern Woodlands, the Native people of North America raised their crops without the use of the plow or other facets of European agriculture. Surprisingly, although there was little machinery, there was also little (by historical agricultural standards) labor—the Seneca, for example, apparently hoed their fields only once between planting and harvesting.

Agriculture, in former times, was accomplished with little more than a sharp stick and a fairly extensive oral tradition of know-how. The forests of Colonial and pre-Colonial times provided an abundant harvest of their own—fish, game, berries, herbs, roots and so forth. The Natural World, intact, is an abundant supplier of local human needs.

The Hau de no sau nee, or Six Nations people, are among those groups which have retained a great deal of memory of agriculture in early times. The Hau de no sau nee could be conceived of as a people divided into two communities—a community of men and a community of women. History and tradition both record that the jobs associated with agriculture under the traditional economy were primarily the province of the community of women. Traditional Native agriculture was very different from European agriculture, ancient and modern.

In ancient times, trees were girdled to cause the leaves to fall (and to provide a standing source of dry firewood), and gardens were laid among the girdled trees. Seeds were planted in groups on small hills in the forest-enriched earth, fertilized when possible with fish scraps, tended with little more than a stick and a hoe, and left to grow. The favorite crops were corn, beans and squash.

Some of the best accounts of the results come from military journals, especially journals from the officers of expeditions against the Indians such as the Clinton-Sullivan campaign during the American Revolution. American soldiers reported finding extensive fields of corn, beans, and squash, and large orchards in the Indian country. Their reports claim that they destroyed millions of bushels of grain in 1779 in the region of the Finger Lakes and the Genessee River of Central New York. The eyewitness accounts of the agricultural production of those regions will astound the unenlightened.

The day when Western agricultural methods were introduced among the Seneca (one of the Six Nations) is recounted in the historical record. Well-meaning Americans (primarily Quakers) approached the Senecas along the Allegany River in the 1790s with offers to teach new techniques of agriculture which involved draft animals and the iron plow. An experiment was conducted whereby two fields were planted—one field utilizing the traditional hilling technique, and the other cleared and plowed according to the European custom. It is reported that at the first harvest, the plowed field produced a slightly larger harvest, and that thereafter the Senecas adapted the technique wholeheartedly. Over the next century, the traditional technology was largely abandoned.

Today, a message comes from a spiritual person of Japan which calls for a serious and intensive return to the traditional agricultural technology. The book which contains this message was written by Masanobu Fukuoka and is entitled The One Straw Revolution—An Introduction to Natural Farming. It is a book which Native and Natural people would be wise to read carefully. Mr. Fukuoka began his adult life as an agricultural scientist who, while still in his twenties, began to question assumptions about large-scale agriculture, and even about agriculture as it has been practiced in Japan for the past 400 years. His reservations about those practices, combined with a strong spiritual vision of the world, have led him to successfully develop an agricultural technique which requires no plowing, no pesticides, no herbicides, no weeding, no chemical fertilizer; he doesn’t even use organic compost. He calls the process “natural farming.” Although the process he advocates arises in southern Japan, and it utilizes crops appropriate to Japanese climate and culture, the philosophy and practice of the technique is amazingly close to that of Native peoples prior to the introduction of European agriculture. To be sure, there are critical innovations—the use of straw and the conscious seeding of legumes such as clover and alfalfa—but there are striking similarities between his techniques and the traditional Native ways of doing things.

European agricultural technology as it was transplanted to the Americas (and since then, to the world,) has always had its drawbacks. European agriculture is distinguished by the process of clearing the land and turning the soil and then setting forth to accomplish the biological simplification of the land until only one life form remains on the field. It is the European farmer’s objective that the only thing left standing in a field of cabages are the cabages [sic]. That process has led to a lot of problems for the farmer.

Plowing the land and planting it to one crop decreases rapidly the fertility of the soil, requiring that the land be refertilized with animal dung, decomposed plant and animal wastes, or chemical fertilizers. Or replanted to a soil-enriching legume, such as clover. The decreased fertility of the soil can be assumed to lead to weakened plants which are more susceptible to disease and parasite infection, and there is much discussion in modern circles to the effect that the plants contain less nutrients for the people who eat them than do plants raised in naturally fertile soil.

Mr. Fukuoka argues that the European mental process, as applied to agriculture, has been trying to find solutions to the problems of plant production on a one-at-a-time basis, rather than seeking the root causes. His arguments are powerfully persuasive, profoundly radical, and spiritually stimulating. He states that the first mistake is made when the land is plowed. That position would probably be dismissed as the mindless ramblings of a hopeless romantic except for the facts that he been practicing what he preaches for more than twenty years and has produced yields comparable to the yields obtained under the most modern chemical techniques, and his position enjoys some historical verification.

The introduction of European agriculture in the Seneca country in the 1790s set into motion a series of processes which are well worth reviewing. According to the accounts, turning the land with a plow did produce an increased crop yield that first year. It is predictable that the particular piece of land was already naturally fertilized, and by definition, had not been worked for a number of years. But once the land was turned, there were introduced a new set of needs which people rarely talk much about.

Cleared land agriculture required animal power, and horses or oxen must be sheltered, watered, and fed. It came to pass that a lot of land had to be cleared for that purpose—hay had to be planted, a great deal more grain needed to be harvested to provide food for the work animals. And it also became necessary to use domestically-produced animal fertilizer, which meant that manure had to be gathered and spread on the fields. Males, who had traditionally been involved primarily in hunting and fishing, now became workers on the homestead not, as has been suggested, because the work was too heavy for women, but because there was such an enormous increase in the amount of work which needed to be done. There were social factors at play in all this, to be sure, but it is undeniable that the amount of work in agricultural production increased several fold following the introduction of this way of doing things. It involved a lot of hard work.

Mr. Fukuoka argues that a lot of it is unnecessary work. He suggests that wnever [sic] Humanity interferes with Nature (as when a field is plowed) . . . things start to go wrong. Once you turn the land, then you must use fertilizer and you need to fight the weeds and there arise all kinds of problems with insects, and plant diseases. The European solutions to these problems—chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and complicated expensive machinery—cost great amounts of money, create pollution, and produce debased food. The chemical solutions continue to deplete the soil and cause the destruction of plant and animal life, while the increased mechanization serves to force people away from an agricultural life while enriching industrialists. We are accustomed to being told that mechanization leads to a more affluent and easier life. Mr. Fukuoka suggests that instead, we live in a fool’s paradise (not his words). Natural farming technologies, he states, produce the same yields as do chemical and machine-intensive technologies, are much less destructive to the environment, require less human labor, and enable people to scale agriculture down to human dimensions. In addition to that, one should add, the natural ways produce much better food, and create broad possibilities for a more human lifestyle.

The powerful aspect of Mr. Fukuoka’s message does not involve natural farming technology, however. His message is timeless and speaks to the nature of human existence. He is a Natural World philosopher, a man with an enormous appreciation of the forces of Creation, and one who understands the potential (and historical) follies of the human mind. The book is more of a philosophical treatise than a technical manual. He explains the basics of his technique, which involves the expert use of cover crops and the reintroduction of complex biology into agriculture, but he is at his best describing his philosophy of Nature. For the most part, his message could have been spoken by a Lakota, a Seneca, or a Zuni traditionalist. That this specific message comes from Japan is a powerful indicator that Natural people have a strong common bond throughout the world.