The Zero Budget Farming Discord

There is unease over the crusader of natural farming, Subhash Palekar, for renaming the technique after himself

- Latha Jishnu

MORE THAN 40 years ago, a Japanese farmer upended conventional thinking on agriculture with his path-breaking book, The One-Straw Revolution. In the book published in 1975, Masanobu Fukuoka advocated a return to natural farming, that is, applying the laws of nature to agricultural practices. It was a revolutionary concept that showed farming needed no external inputs at all. Fukuoka’s idea was simple: leave the Earth alone. No ploughing, no tilling, no use of chemicals or prepared fertilisers. Nor did he flood his rice fields as farmers in Asia have done from time immemorial. Yet, the onetime plant pathologist stunned the world with crop yields that equalled, if not surpassed, those of Japan’s best farms.