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What ‘Do Nothing’ Farming Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life
What could grow if we stopped forcing everything to be perfect?
In 1937, a Japanese agricultural scientist named Masanobu Fukuoka was hospitalized with a terrible case of pneumonia. Confronted with the possibility of his own death, Fukuoka spiraled into an existential crisis that lasted long after he was discharged from the hospital. At night, he couldn’t sleep, so he wandered aimlessly. One evening, he fell asleep against the trunk of a large tree. When he woke up, he noticed a night heron flying toward the harbor — it sparked an epiphany. “All the concepts to which I had been clinging, the very notion of existence itself, were empty fabrications,” Fukuoka later wrote. “My spirit became light and clear.”
In short, Fukuoka realized how futile it was to try to understand and control one’s environment. As the Taoist saying goes, “the world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond the winning.” It changed his life.
It also inspired him to establish a new way of farming. Instead of controlling the land by flooding it and forcing crops to grow during certain seasons, Fukuoka designed a technique that worked with the land’s natural biodiversity, life cycles, and ecosystem. Though it took time and patience, this new…
