Natural farming

Natural farming is an abstract framework for finding an extremely energy-efficient method of farming that is robust against diseases and serves as a foundation for the happy lives of its users. It is abstract because it is not a prescriptive method or set of rigid guidelines; it is a framework for finding a method.

In essence, the framework is: go meditate in your garden on "what does nature need here" and allow the resulting insights from your brain to guide what you do. While it will eventually produce high yields, if you try to produce high yields instead of giving nature what it needs, you will likely not achieve consistently high yields.

Natural farming was popularised by Masanobu Fukuoka, who had an epiphany that most rational knowledge created by humans will fail to surpass nature when it comes to building natural systems (ie farms)^[1]. To prove this philosophy, Fukuoka produced a farm that consistently rivalled the top rice yields in Japan using as little effort as possible. Using only hand tools, his farms outproduced farms equipped with masses of fertiliser, pesticides, machinery, and all of the "latest and greatest" from industrial farming at the time.

I think natural farming differs significantly from Permaculture in two ways.

1. At the design phase, permaculture involves sitting down and using your rational brain to make a best guess at what should grow where on the land. Meanwhile, natural farming involves scattering many different seeds and using your observing which plants thrive where. Permaculture's "observe and interact" principle kicks in only after an initial heavy-labour design phase, whereas natural farming defers the design to nature.
2. Permaculture most often serves the goal of maximising crop yields, whereas natural farming serves the goal of giving nature what it wants first. See Solitude Farm for a great example of this.