Natural Way of Farming

Questions

2.8.1.1. What is surface drainage? 2-3 weeks before rice harvesting, do you drain all water from the field, or just the top layer of water (ie lower the irrigation channel water levels)?

Why publish yet another summary of Fukuoka?

This one is different! I swear!

I promise that what you're about to read is different to anything I've seen on the internet. I wrote this and tried to throw it as far and wide over the internet as I could, because most natural farming information out there is missing the most crucial practical information that Masanobu Fukuoka left behind, in my opinion. Most people I've heard of who try to emulate Masanobu's natural farming just read his other two popular books, try and give up. I am yet to find a person who has deeply read this book and also tried to reproduce Fukuoka's amazing success (especially with grains).

Discovering natural farming is hard, period

To date, nobody that I know of has successfully implemented Masanobu's succession planting grain with broad seeding and natural irrigation, which is perhaps the most high energy and space efficient grain farming method known to us in recent history. Let's brainstorm why this hasn't happened yet. Possible reasons include:

Nobody has yet tried hard enough for long enough. Possible reasons are:
1. Transitioning to natural farming can take a long time, and people give up during the transition (which led Masanobu himself to many years of failed harvests).
2. People don't have sufficient knowledge to survive the transition period.
3. People likely to try these methods (ie farmers) are financially constrained (and cannot afford the losses), which shortens their potential transition period.
4. A combination of the above reasons. Without sufficient knowledge (2), people make the already-long transition (1) longer than it needs to be, and this is longer than the maximum time they're able to wait (3).
The environment has changed in such a way that these results are much harder to reproduce with the same effort. The possible reasons are numerous, as we have changed much of the climate and robbed nature of much biodiversity since Masanobu accomplished what he did.

What're the chances of Masanobu, really?

Discovering the knowledge of natural farming requires tremendous friction in our world. Masanobu already analysed why industrial capitalism continues to plunge into increasingly unnatural and reductive-scientific methods, and why these methods are unsustainable ^[1]. In light of this, and the fact that it took Fukuoka the better part of 20 years to converge on this grain method, it's already incredible that he was able to take this long.

Masanobu was uniquely positioned to rediscover the knowledge of natural farming in our high-friction world.

Landowner. He had the privilege of owning existing farm land.
Devoid of high capitalistic pressure. He did not need to bring in a high income.
Scientific background. He had a background in biological sciences, and therefore an ability to interpret his intuitions in nature.
Inordinate amounts of free time and joy in exploring farm experiments. He could focus purely on the natural system that included his farm, and clearly enjoyed conducting experiments on his farm enough to do it for the second half of his life. In addition to his rare level of financial freedom, I assume his free time was due in part to neglecting his family too.
A willingness to challenge authority. He did not mind pissing off his neighbours and broader community to prove his point. He was a self-assured hermit.
Preference for the flow-state over rationality. He respected the power of flow, and sought insights that arose from his intuition during periods of intense connection with his farm.
A burning desire to disprove the utility of rationality. His epiphany arising after his near-death experience drove him to use an unconventional way of thinking to improve farming.

These six things are each quite unlikely. To create another Masanobu not purely by chance, you would really have to try. If you were to rediscover these things with only partial knowledge from Masanobu, I assume it would still take many years to reproduce his results - and that's assuming you have the huge amount of free time, lack of financial pressure, disciplined scientific mindset, and ability to connect with your intuition.

When you consider this, the chances of spawning a Masanobu feel mind-boggling slim. Of course, other permaculture greats like Sepp Holzer seemed to create similarly bountiful farms. Sepp credited a lot of insights about his farm to his dreams (6), was able to maintain a profitable existence while he explored more natural farming (2) on his own farm (1), and fought even the law to develop his ways (4). It's not to say you can't access the knowledge Masanobu found with a subset of these circumstances, but you clearly need a majority.

Why do you care so much about the specifics of natural farming?

I'm pretty scared about the collapse of industrial agriculture. As of 2026, it turns out that to cause mass starvation, there's a very simple process.

Cut off 20% of the world's oil supply for less than a month. For example, by exploding some pointy things in the Gulf states.
Temporarily increase fertiliser prices, causing many farmers to scale down or altogether avoid plantings because it's too expensive, and they're too hooked on industrial farming methods to come up with an alternative.
Wait about six months for food prices to jump from the ensuing food shortage, causing wealthier nations to stockpile food, further inflating the prices of food for poorer countries that didn't stockpile yet.
Watch as tens of millions of people (fact check with UN) in poorer nations become unable to afford food.

This is the suffering we get from one very specific (albeit core and far reaching) failure in in the supply chain of industrial agriculture. But other points of failure are becoming more likely, such as plant diseases and ecological collapse source.

What do you think will happen to the price of food when bees disappear and we have to pollinate some crops entirely by hand? Either the price goes up (because the labour did), or the price stays the same and someone is being forced to work much harder for the same pay as before. You turn the "coercive slavery" dial up a notch in our big capitalism machine, or you turn the price notch up. Please don't let your empathy stop for the people behind your cheap supermarket prices for food; consumer expectations of cheap goods cause mass suffering, to the point where expecting to pay a few dollars for your favourite Thai green curry mix maintains human trafficked employees that cut the eyeballs off shrimp to trigger a breeding frenzy^[2]. Yes, I'm serious! source

The machine we buy our produce from is unbelievably fucked up. In the best case, when things get harder to make, our complex supply chains disguise human and animal exploitation. In the worst case, your groceries get more expensive and people starve.

Wow, that was depressing. What next?

To sum it up so far:

The chances of discovering natural farming knowledge yourself without standing on the shoulders of giants (aka using other people's discoveries) are pretty slim and take a reaaally long time.
The chances of merely reproducing high-efficiency natural farming are, evidently, pretty low. I suspect this is because most people I've talked to about Fukuoka don't even know his practical guidebook exists, let alone have they taken adequate notes on it.
Regenerative agriculture warrants a lot of attention, because our under-regulated capitalist industrial agriculture system creates so much suffering, and it's only going to get worse with climate change.

If you were inspired by Masanobu's writing, and you want to create viable (meaning sufficiently robust and high-energy and space efficiency) change in our food systems, then I believe it deserves another 5-10 hours of your best efforts to climb as high up the giants' shoulders that you can. The practical payoff is that it might actually become possible for you to reproduce Masanobu's work, and it might even take you less time than it's taken anyone before! You could become one of the first known people to reproduce his work! And even if you're the millionth, your chances of succeeding surely get way higher by being aware of the follies that cost people years of experimenting (or caused them to abandon it altogether).

About this book

This book is the sequel to The One Straw Revolution and prequel to Sowing Seeds in the Desert. The middle chunk is the practical implementation of One Straw Revolution, and is perhaps Fukuoka's analogue to Mollison's Permaculture Design Manual. The only other specific practical advice about farming that he left behind is the elaborate seed-ball recipe in the appendix of Sowing Seeds in the Desert, which he hoped would be thrown into the man-made deserts of the world to save us from starvation (which means stupid-expensive food prices if you're lucky enough to live in the global north).

This book contains the most important and neglected part of Fukuoka's knowledge; the practical how-to-start-and-run a natural farm, as well as the experimental process, hypotheses and insights that led to Fukuoka's theory. The latter is especially important, because as your specific implementation of natural farming will likely differ to Masanobu's, knowing how he troubleshot will help you troubleshoot too.

In order to make this information more accessible, I have summarised the practical information from this book, and provided italicised references to diagrams, tables and detailed-guides that you might want to look at yourself.

At some point, I'd like to come back and re-index the helpful concepts and advice in this book, so that I can more easily look stuff up when I'm in the field. I might call this hypothetical project The Masanobu Manual, but you're more than welcome to make one yourself.

Masanobu's how-to from 10,000 feet

Concrete skills

Seeding
- Clay-ball individual seeds to stop insects and birds from destroying them.
Grain
- Intercrop (aka use succession planting) for best results.
Ground cover. Always keep the ground covered with a species you can manage, like annual clovers. "Manage" means "you can suppress it when you want to grow something there", like by mowing clover before seeding, or flooding a clover field during rice seed germination.

Having read this book twice, I think the future of natural farming is:

Reproducing Fukuoka's major work (possibly the highest energy and space efficient grain farming method known to us). After at least a 40 year absence of any examples of Masanobu's purported high-productivity farming, we should make a solid attempt to reproduce his results in hobbyist or community farm patches with small-scale experiments on grain fields (no bigger than a quarter acre, as he did on his own farm). When someone in a locality has reproduced the method, they can teach their neighbours.
- This may take many years (perhaps even 7) of no-till. See 2.6.3
Explore Fukuoka's conjectures.
- Perennial rice cultivations in warmer climates (without frost). In 2.5.1, Fukuoka notes that you can apply fertiliser to already-harvested rice stubble and get regenerated rice, as long as the plant is not subject to frost. He wanted to explore practical ways to get multiple harvests from one rice planting, which you could do if your winter is mild. This resonates with Mark Shepard's preference for perennials.
- Growing grain amongst established vegetable fields. In 2.6.2, he notes that rice yields were higher when rice was grown amongst tomato, eggplant and cucumber.

Introduction

Fukuoka created a robust strain of rice that has a grain ratio between 70 - 100 (ie planting one seed of rice yields 70 grains, and two harvests over a year would produce between $70^{2} \approx 5000$ grains and $100^{2} = 10000$ grains of rice). He claims it is one of the highest yielding strains in the world. He grew it in fields that were not constantly flooded, meaning it is also suited to soils in drier climates provided they have enough water retention. He recommends planting it

In two years (after 3 harvests), you would have $70^{3} \approx 343, 000$ grains, which he says is enough for a half-acre.
However, he says that harvesting a half-acre one year would yield enough rice to sow 50 acres the next, meaning the yield could be as high as 100:1.

I have created, together with the insects in my fields, a new strain of rice I call "Happy Hill." This is a hardy strain with the blood of wild variants in it, yet it is also one of the highest yielding strains of rice in the world. If a single head of Happy Hill were sent across the sea to a country where food is scarce and there sown over a ten-square-yard area, a single grain would yield 5,000 grains in one year's time. There would be grain enough to sow a half-acre the following year, fifty acres two years hence, and 7,000 acres in the fourth year. This could become the seed rice for an entire nation. This handful of grain could open up the road to independence for a starving people.
Introduction

The Practice of Natural Farming, 135

The unique part of this book, and the most cohesive compilation of Fukuoka's practical knowledge. My hope is to make this information more accessible by writing a very short summary over the table of contents.

Key

Bold text = chapter, subchapter, etc
Italic text = diagrams or dense useful tables
Regular text = my notes or quotes.

Starting a Natural Farm, 137
- The natural farm must be able to supply all the materials and resources essential for food, clothing, and shelter. In addition to fields for growing crops, a complete natural farm should include also a bordering wood.
- Scenic beauty perfects the site. A good environment in an attractive setting provides the physical and spiritual elements necessary for living a pleasant life.
1. Keep a Natural Protected Wood, 137
  - Diagram on species layout in an orchard. I intend to use it for My farm.
  - Whatever the means employed, the natural farmer must secure a nearby supply of humus that can serve as a source of soil fertility. Examples of soil-enriching techniques:
    1. Direct burial of coarse organic matter deep in the ground.
    2. Gradual soil improvement by planting grasses and trees that send roots deep into the soil.
    3. Enrichment of the farm by carrying nutrients built up in the humus of the upland woods or forest downhill with rainwater or by other means.
  1. Growing a Wood Preserve, 139.
    - What to plant to restabilise vegetation on the top of a hill, which is the most vulnerable part to denudation.
    - Vine -> low conifer (evergreens) + grass/bush -> ferns + mix of trees (reserve)
    - A bamboo grove is also a good reserve since it grows in only a year. Take care to choose the bamboo species wisely, and learn how to tame / harvest it.
  2. Shelterbelts, 139
    - Prevent wind damage, improve soil fertility.
2. Setting Up an Orchard, 139
  - There's no need for bulldozing if you're not going to use machines, which natural farming doesn't require. The only major operation is picking fruit, which if you tend the form of the trees properly, should be easily doable by hand.
  - Orchard vegetation by function (eg protected, green manure, evergreen).
3. Starting a Garden, 140
  - You can plant vegetables and grains amidst your orchard.
  - By observing the types of weeds that grow in a place, you can determine what vegetables and grains are the most suitable there.
  - How to choose vegetables based on weeds.
  - When starting a garden, the main goal is prevention of weeds and soil movement. Use buckwheat for this in summer, Indian rapeseed and rapeseed for winter. Once the garden is mature (the weeds are under control), you can grow anything.
  - Suggested initial succession planting in an early garden.
  1. The Non-Integrated Garden, 141
    - Preventing soil movement is well done with terraces. Ability to build stable earthen embankments (ie dry walls, using knowledge of the soil) can be a determining factor in success of the garden.
    - Slightly graded terraces create much higher crop returns and efficiency of farm work. Learn to terrace.
    - Bury coarse organic matter in the terraces you build to rapidly prepare them for fertiliser-free cultivation.
4. Creating a Rice Paddy, 142
  - You shouldn't make a rice field with machinery. It makes water stagnant (causing root rot), the top soil is distributed unevenly. Concrete paths destroy microbial communities.
  1. Traditional Paddy Preparation, 142
    - Traditional Japanese farmers preferred to build rice paddies in the hills by digging trenches to draw water from valley streams. Building a paddy should be fun in a way that using machines isn't!
5. Crop Rotation, 143
  - Intercropping is essential for healthy growth. Fruit trees need to be connected to other trees, weeds and vegetables.
  - Crop rotation is essential to keep the soil covered as much as possible.
  - Leaving vegetables to themselves in the field allows nature to solve the problems of continuous cropping, space, disease, pest damage, and recovery of soil fertility.
  - There is no universally agreed upon basic crop rotation scheme. However, there are guides.
  - Pictures of grain grown at various stages, including new growth amidst ground cover. This will surely be extremely helpful to identify how close you are to the delicate optimal sowing timings of ground cover with other plants when you wish to broadseed (ie large-scale low-intensity cultivation). I wonder how many people who tried Fukuoka's broadseeding method and failed to control their weeds took note of this section.
  - Pictures of Fukuoka's farm. Companion plantings eg orange with black wattle, daikons with turnips. The hillside orchard that went from hard clay to fertile soil in 5-10 years.
  - Pictures of an anti-desertification project in Somalia. Includes four pictures depicting premature germination, where you water the fuck out of grasses mid-summer to make them grow prematurely and die in the heat they would have remained dormant through. Also includes the picture used for the cover of Sowing Seeds in the Desert.
  - Continuous crop rotation for vegetables, grains, and mixed fields. Perhaps the most important diagrams in the book. Fukuoka's suggested crop rotation over 5-10 years for both cold and hot climates. Starts with grasses in year one and proceeds to diversify in later years. Fukuoka recommends using this schedule to transition from scientific to natural farming. Various alternatives.
  1. Rice/Barley Cropping, 144
    - Japanese farmers have used this for a long time to get consistently high yields of both, but no other country's farmers were using this method according to Fukuoka in 1985.
    - If all the straw and chaff from threshed grain were returned to the field, only 15% of currently applied amounts of nitrogenous fertiliser would need to be applied by farmers. If you use a leguminous ground cover, you don't need this at all. See Veganic gardening for effective mowing of ground cover to make its nitrogen available to other plants.
  2. Upland Rice, 144
    - Might be an effective species for coping with worldwide food shortages.
    - Unstable, often subject to drought, yields lower than paddy-grown rice.
  3. Minor Grains, 156
    - Grass-family grains like corn, millet, buckwheat, job's tears. Worth trying to grow given their wilder forms might be easier to come by. However, seed preservation of these grains was becoming difficult in the 1980s; all the more reason to try grow a handful of them!
    - The wilder the food, the greater its medicinal value. Kawaguchi was a big proponent of plant medicine, so I wonder what his opinion on different grains is.
  4. Vegetables, 156
    - Cruciferous winter vegetables should be sown just before the emergence of weeds because they can outcompete them. They also have deep roots which improves soil.
    - Fukuoka found that growing vegetables in a semi-wild state allowed them to grow with almost no fertiliser / compost.
  5. Fruit Trees and Crop Rotation, 156
    - Interplanting with evergreens and deciduous trees may help minimise damage. Growing vegetables beneath fruit trees (or amidst any perennials) reduces insect and disease damage.
    - Disease and pest damage is largely due to: depleted soil fertility, confused tree shape, poor ventilation, or inadequate light penetration.
Rice and Winter Grain, 157
1. The Course of Rice Cultivation in Japan, 157
  1. Changes in Rice Cultivation Methods, 158
    - In an effort to maximise yields, the focus of rice farming improvements in Japan changed over the decades:
      - In 1940 the focus was on tilling methods amidst existing by hand farming methods
      - 1950, fertiliser production via animals
      - 1960, mechanisation via scientific farming
      - 1970, energy-intensive systemising via agribusiness
2. Barley and Wheat Cultivation, 159
  - Farmers in Japan used to double-crop their field (rice followed by barley) even though barley was a pain in the ass to grow and harvest (with their methods); they did it for pride, and because they knew it boosted their rice production. Eventually, barley was forgone for wheat until the government ceased import taxes on cheap USA wheat, which killed the wheat farming industry in Japan. Then, as now (2026), there was only rice in the fields.
  - Fukuoka wanted to find a new way of succession planting with rice, barley and wheat to permit farmers to economically and efficiently perform natural farming; he wanted to improve on the tradition that existed before.
  1. Natural Barley/ Wheat Cropping, 160
    - How Fukuoka actually arrived at his famous achievement of natural farming for intercropping rice and barley. It took him years of failure, but the persistence paid off. It's possible that many people give up on applying this natural method to their own fields because they cannot afford to wait through this period of failure, and there are not enough hobbyist (aka financially unaccountable) farms currently exploring it.
    1. Tillage, ridging, and drilling, 161.
      - Experimented with ridge density in field, row density on ridges, and barley density in rows. Realised that ridges were unnecessary.
    2. Light-tillage, low-ridge or level-row cultivation, 161
      - Realised less tillage was better, so tried methods on an unploughed field. Fukuoka thinks embracing no-till was the key change in direction.
      - Explored weed control with ground cover (clover) and leftover rice straw. Using rice straw as mulch was taboo at the time, because it was believed it always caused disease. However, this was only true if it decomposed on the field spring, right before rice planting, which when you think about it, makes sense; it's unnatural for an annual seasonal crop to be dying atop its new saplings, and probably invites unknown diseases the crop the never evolved to combat.
    3. No-tillage, direct-seeding cultivation, 161
      - Questioned why rice and barley (two grasses) should be planted so differently, and opted for broad-seeding. Realised that you can sow all the grain seeds for the year at once with over-wintering rice seeds. Though he doesn't mention it here, this would have to coincide with the introduction of clay-covering seeds or seed-balling to prevent insects and birds from eating the seeds.
      - An agricultural survey comparing the barley yields of Fukuoka's unfertilised fields (from the aforementioned experiments) versus fertilised fields. The yield of a natural field versus a fertilised one was 9.4% less but with better grain quality, far less labour (ie in weed control, planting) and at least ten years of longevity (barley and rice in both years).
3. Early Experiences with Rice Cultivation, 164
  - Analysis of a project plan during Fukuoka's early life at an agricultural research station during WWII. The goal was to increase yields by restraining a particular pest, the rice borer.
4. Second Thoughts on Post-Season Rice Cultivation, 166
  - Re-analysis of the above project with the knowledge of natural farming and hindsight (in a way that was predictable with foresight). This affirmed Fukuoka's resolve to not rely on human decision-making for improving farming.
  - It must be remembered that diseases and pest damage are self-defense measures taken by nature to restore balance when the natural order has been disturbed. Pests are a divine warning that something has gone wrong, that the natural balance of rice plants has been upset. People must realize that nature's way of restoring an abnormal or diseased body is to fight fire with fire, to use naturally occurring disease and infestation to counter further disease and pest damage.
5. First Steps toward Natural Rice Farming, 168
  1. Natural Seeding, 169
    - Fukuoka first succeeded at over-wintering by coating rice seeds in a mixture of pesticide and synthetic resin.
    - He notes that you can apply fertiliser to already-harvested rice stubble and get regenerated rice, as long as the plant is not subject to frost. Fukuoka wanted to explore this in future, but I guess he never wrote about it. He realised this when he reasoned that certain insects survive winter by hiding in regenerated rice stalks.
  2. Natural Direct Seeding, 170
    - How Fukuoka arrived at direct seeding (that is, not transplanting). He believes the centuries of artificial selection on modern rice species will make it impractical to sow them directly; they are dependent on transplants now. I wonder if this is true of Masanobu's grandson's farm and its current version of his "Happy Hill" rice.
    - Fukuoka tried throwing various densities of rice seed and found that the yields were not significantly different. More seeds does not equal more rice grains beyond some safe threshold. The median value of Fukuoka's experiment (which should be a safe bet) is 60 seeds per square yard, or 72 seeds per square meter.
6. Early Attempts at Direct-Seeding, No-Tillage Rice/Barley Succession, 171
  - These findings are taking place concurrently with the barley cropping experiments in 2.2.1.
  1. Direct Seeding of Rice between Barley, 171
    - Various attempts made during the ridging phase of his grain field explorations in 2.2.1.1. Interestingly, Fukuoka notes that rice yields were better when sown in an existing vegetable field (of tomato, eggplant and cucumber) than when the rice was grown in the same field after vegetable harvesting.
  2. Direct-Seeding Rice / Barley Succession, 172
    - The rowed barley cultivation was so effective in an untilled field that trying to till and then plant rice seeds between them was difficult. Fukuoka tried scattering the rice seeds 10-20 days before cutting barley. Germination was good and seed losses from birds seemed low. Although this proved to be part of the final method, Fukuoka discarded it for now.
  3. Direct-Seeding, No-Tillage Rice/Barley Succession, 173
    - Fukuoka's core grain method (but not the final one) was published in 1962, the same year as Silent Spring (which founded the environmentalist movement) and the time in which Sepp Holzer was solidifying his home-grown approach which was later dubbed a standout example of permaculture.
    - Finally, Fukuoka abandoned tilling entirely, which sounds like it would have been a great taboo to say amongst farmers at the time. In 1962, he published his findings. In 1985 (this book), he wrote that he had been growing rice and barley without plowing for 20 years, which means he at least stopped tilling by 1955. This means there was a seven year period between stopping tilling and Fukuoka having a paper ready to publish findings. It doesn't mean it took seven years to successfully grow this succession, but it means it took up to seven years of non-tillage. I find this significant because I assume most people give up before then, and perhaps the reason Fukuoka's grain technique hasn't been replicated is because people haven't tried no-till for long enough.
7. Natural Rice and Barley/Wheat Cropping, 174
  - Fukuoka was still using pesticides at this point and had issues with weed control. This prompted him to explore clay covers and clover as weed control. He called it the "clover revolution", likely in opposition to the industrial green revolution at the time.
8. Direct-Seeding, No-Tillage Barley/Rice Succession with Green Manure Cover, 174
  - This section is the closest thing to a step-by-step process in Fukuoka's works. It gives you the best chance of being able to efficiently grow grain with hand tools like he did.
  1. Cultivation Method, 174
    - An overview of the whole year.
  2. Farmwork, 175
    - How to prepare land for rice farming. The method is simple but advanced, and so Fukuoka advises high-precision for all of the following.
    - The information is not super clear to me, but in Fukuoka's writing I have interpreted:
      - "levee" as "the wall surrounding the paddy"
      - "irrigation channel" as "the trench at the perimeter of the rice paddy"
      - "drainage channel" as "a trench dug through the middle of a rice paddy"
    1. Digging drainage channels, 175
      - Fukuoka assumes you have a regular rice paddy field with existing irrigation channels. You can check out what I saw demonstrated at Akame farm school or research this yourself.
      - 2-3 weeks before rice harvest, you open the levee to surface drain the water out from the field. Does this mean you just lower the water levels in the irrigation channel?
      - After the rice harvest, dig 8x8 square inch channels every 5-6m along your paddy to more quickly drain the field, which helps the barley and green manure grow instead of weeds.
    2. Harvesting, threshing, and cleaning the rice, 175.
      - Cut the rice. It's fine to trample the clover and young barley shoots, which should have 2 or 3 leaves. Using machines is fine, but you can build a thresher yourself (beat the rice over a triangular frame atop a tarp) and manual hullers are cheap.
    3. Seeding clover, barley, and rice, 176
      - Seeding date and quantity per quarter-acre.
      - Preparing clay pellets. Although I'm probably going to use something like this, which Fukuoka suggests doing for large seed quantities with a concrete mixer.
    4. Fertilization, 177
      - Fukuoka used chicken manure, but he also suggests human or animal manure, or even wood ashes. Practically, it means whatever decomposed organic material you have. Do not use fresh manure since this can harm seedlings.
      - When and how much fertiliser to spread on your field per quarter-acre.
        
        After rice harvest: 300-400kg
        
        During barley heading (optional): 90kg
        
        After barley harvest: 200-400kg after a high yield
        
        During rice heading (optional): 90kg
      - Alternatively, you can release 10 ducklings per quarter-acre when the rice seedlings have become established. They will pick insects and lightly turn the soil too. Presumably, this means that one duckling provides about 30kg of manure over its season in the field. You'll need protection from stray dogs and hawks; why not guard geese or llamas?
    5. Straw mulching, 178
      - Return all of the straw and chaff (husks, hulls) back to the field from whence they came.
    6. Harvesting and threshing barley, 179
      - Five people are enough for harvesting and threshing (including hulling) on a quarter-acre.
      - Once you've seeded the barley and mulched the straw back in the field, there is nothing to do with the grains until the barley is ready for harvest. Enjoy your winter holiday.
    7. Irrigation and drainage, 179
      - The first 20 days of rice and barley cropping is the most critical; the main problems are ensuring germination and controlling weeds. Water management (irrigation and drainage) is the most important part of grain crop management. It's probably the hardest challenge for newbies.
      - Notify your neighbours you'll be irrigating at different times to them if you're using natural farming and they're not. Fukuoka ran into trouble with this, and I believe his son Masato stopped Fukuoka's grain method largely because he wanted to repair relationships with their neighbours (the farm now floods its rice fields).
      - Manage your levees. See Kawaguchi's natural farming#Naturally irrigated fields.
        
        Once you can consistently prevent leakages in your levees (aka drainage channels), you are an expert rice farmer. In Japan, this means being an expert mole catcher.
        
        If you build concrete levees, when they break they're going to be harder to repair (ie moles will dig under them in a few years).
    8. Disease and pest "control", 180
      - Fukuoka noted "clouds" of dragonflies and "flocks" of sparrows around his fields as markers of biodiversity resulting from natural farming.
9. High-Yield Cultivation of Rice and Barley, 181
  1. The Ideal Form of a Rice Plant, 181
    - Dimensions of ideal shape of rice plant. Lengths for internodes, leaves and sheaths.
  2. Analysis of the Ideal Form, 183
    - Describes the ideal ratios within internodes, sheaths and leaves.
    - The rice plant only needs 3-4 internodes, whereas conventionally farmers like to have 6-7.
  3. The Ideal Shape of Rice, 184
    - Shorter plants are better. If you apply lots of fertiliser you'll think you're going to get lots of rice because the plants are big, but this is the wrong mindset; in rice too, it's not size that matters, but what you do with it. In fact, larger rice plants produce smaller yields.
    - See the diagrams in the next subsection.
  4. A Blueprint for the Natural Cultivation of Ideal Rice, 185
    - Diagrams of the ideal shape of a rice plant.
  5. The Meaning and Limits of High Yields, 186
    - A table breaking down harvest yields. Yield (kg) per area, plants per area, heads per plant, grains per head.
    - Blueprint for high-yield rice cultivation. This table allows you to aim for a particular target yield, seed a certain density look, then diagnose your progress with the number of heads/tillers per plant. Relates panicle type, planting time, soil richness, fertiliser (chicken manure), water management type, based on the panicle type.
    - Diagnosing your yields. Fukuoka never tried to use scientific knowledge to increase yields. He believes that you will indirectly increase your yields by focusing your efforts on what nature needs (which you will identify from being present with your land).
Fruit Trees, 190
1. Establishing an Orchard, 190
  1. Natural Seedlings and Grafted Nursery Stock, 191
  2. Orchard Management, 191
    1. Correcting the tree form, 191
    2. Weeds, 192
    3. Terracing, 192
2. A Natural Three-Dimensional Orchard, 192
3. Building Up Orchard Earth without Fertilizers, 193
  1. Why I Use a Ground Cover, 193
  2. Ladino Clover, Alfalfa, and Acacia, 195
  3. Features of Ladino Clover, 195
  4. Seedling Ladino Clover, 195
  5. Managing Ladino Clover, 195
  6. Alfalfa for Arid Land, 196
  7. Black Wattle 196
  8. Black Wattle Protects Natural Predators, 197
  9. Some Basics on Setting Up a Ground Cover, 197
  10. Soil Management, 198
4. Disease and Insect Control, 199
  1. Arrowhead Scale, 201
  2. Mites, 201
  3. Cottony-Cushion Scale, 202
  4. Red Wax Scale, 202
  5. Other Insect Pests, 202
  6. Mediterranean Fruit Fly and Codling Moth, 203
5. The Argument against Pruning, 204
  1. No Basic Method, 204
  2. Misconceptions about the Natural Form, 206
  3. Is Pruning Really Necessary ?, 207
6. The Natural Form of a Fruit Tree, 209
  1. Example of Natural Forms, 211
  2. Attaining the Natural Form, 211
  3. Natural Form in Fruit Tree Cultivation, 213
  4. Problems with the Natural Form, 213
7. Conclusion, 216
Vegetables, 217
1. Natural Rotation of Vegetables, 217
2. Semi-Wild Cultivation of Vegetables, 218
  1. A Natural Way of Growing Garden Vegetables, 218
  2. Scattering Seed on Unused Land, 219
  3. Things to Watch Out For, 221
3. Disease and Pest Resistance, 221
  1. Resistances of Vegetables to Disease and Insects, 223
  2. Minimal Use of Pesticides, 223