Krish interview

Context

In a stroke of good luck and accidental invitation, Krish is keen to do a big podcast phone call yapping about his experience with natural farming. This is fantastic, both for me but also for other aspiring natural farmers and regenerative agriculturalists in search of thriving models to draw inspiration from.

For context, I've been searching for examples of natural farming for the better part of a year. I've checked out some permaculture farm stays, but I am yet to see any permaculture farms that truly inspire me for farming at the impending end of the world (as we know it). I've read all three of Fukuoka's major works (The One Straw Revolution, Natural Way of Farming, and Sowing Seeds in the Desert), and am eager to see real world examples implementing their principles. Given my difficulty in finding living examples and proponents of natural farming, Krish and his Solitude Farm are wonderful and unique!

Prospects of natural farming

So what's the fuss with natural farming? I see it as a few things of great value:

• The most energy-efficient means of producing food that I'm aware of. Traditional Japanese farming reportedly hovered somewhere between 2 calories out for every 1 calorie in (ie feed 2 people for every 1 person working on it). Modern agriculture sits far below 1:1. Natural farming, by Fukoka's calculations, sits at 3:1. Energy-efficiency is important, because today, it seems few people want to be a farmer. It sits at the bottom of the social hierarchy, is seen as excessively laborious, and is often fulfilled by exploitable classes (migrants, backpackers in search of visa extensions in Australia). For me personally, if modern agriculture is "as good as it gets" for subsistence, I'd probably rather starve to death and come back as a plant.
• A thriving example of regenerative agriculture against desertification. As articulated in Sowing Seeds in the Desert, desertification is one of the most gruelling challenges of our environmental destruction. The world's deserts are spreading into much of the land used for food production (indeed, industrial farming techniques are a large cause). This may also affect the availability of clean drinking water. Fukuoka described techniques that he believes (and claims to have witnessed) can restore soil from degraded and unsuitable to growing crops into a thriving ecosystem supporting fruit orchards, wild vegetables and grains.
• A foundation for fulfilling living. In other words, we might say it has capacity for great personal health, community building, and meaningful life. The world today is seething with grief, guilt and undirected rage; people see how fucked up it all is, but feel increasingly powerless and unsure of what to do about it. While there surely exist economic hurdles to acquiring land for farming, learning to grow food in a regenerative way may a highly effective step that people can start taking immediately. Naively, this might take place on private property, but community gardens and disused public spaces can benefit from this too. Guerilla gardening already exists in many cities, which use intensive gardening or low-energy techniques like seedbombing to increase rewildling and combat biodiversity collapse.

Open questions for natural farming

Okay, that all sounds fantastic! What are the potential drawbacks of natural farming, at least as I understand it from Fukuoka's works? Many lie in its prospects for global application.

• As far as I'm aware^[1], there are no other documented examples beyond Fukuoka's farm of regeneration and ongoing food production using natural farming. While it sounds like an amazing prospect, it would be great to see its successes and roadblocks when it's implemented elsewhere. There may have been factors inherent to Fukuoka's farm that make it untenable in other locations, or it may need to be supplemented with other regenerative techniques. For example, Fukuoka's farmlands had not been ploughed for 40 years by the time he started (is this true, or had they been ploughed roughly until he took over from his father? I might be misremembering this). If Fukuoka's lands were already partly un-degraded from rewilding, can we replicate or accelerate this process with other techniques (ie from soil ecology)?
• It doesn't account for rewildling with native species. In Sowing Seeds in the Desert, Fukuoka essentially advocates for seedbombing the planet with an elaborate seedbomb containing seeds for various cover crops, pioneering trees, vegetables and fruit trees. He suggests that while it'd be great to replant native species, he thinks the world's ecosystem quarantining has failed to prevent the spread of all species everywhere. As such, Fukuoka reckons it's better to use a seedbomb recipe that he's seen success with in rewilding within multiple countries (specifically California, India (where), Africa (where) and Thailand (again, where?)). While validating Fukuoka's seedbomb recipe for successful anti-desertification is a worthy goal in itself, I bet ecologists, indigenous communities and other land stewards would have some problems to voice with this. One I can imagine is the biodiversity collapse we're welcoming in doing so; saying goodbye to countless existing ecosystems means binning already-adapted species for various conditions, and as climate change creates new and more extreme conditions, I suspect we need all the options we can get to stand a chance. In some defence of Fukuoka, he does at least recommend using seedbombs containing diverse species as a kind of diagnostic tool for what readily grows there, and isn't totally prescriptive of species (though he gives examples for his climate, of course).

How can interviewing Krish help with all this?

Sweet! There might be other drawbacks, but let's proceed for now. Krish's experience natural farming at Solitude Farm has a multitude of inspiring factors that warrant further discussion.

• While Krish started with what kind clover as a cover crop beneath what kind grain, he eventually embraced "weeds" that grew more readily. This may hold valuable insights for the rewilding process that can occur within natural farming, and its viability as a framework for reintroducing native species after a period of interventionary soil/ecosystem rehabilitation.
• Krish's project, Solitude farm is based in Tamil-Nadu, India, which has a different climate from Fukuoka's farm how different, how so. If the soil on Solitude farm was intensely degraded at its inception, Krish may be able to tell the story of the crucial first steps at soil rehabilitation, which seems to be a daunting obstacle for many aspiring homesteaders and regenerative farmers. Maybe this is a pretty well-researched problem, but if it is, I'd be surprised I haven't come across it yet
• Krish learned from Fukuoka himself, and stayed at his farm while he was still alive. Other prominent advocates of natural farming who stayed at his farm have since passed away, chiefly Larry Korn who else?. Being able to quiz Fukuoka about his experience is highly valuable, since we can get second-hand insights about the original example of natural farming.

The interview questions

Early life and introduction to natural farming

1. How did you come to learn about Masanobu Fukuoka's farm, and why did you travel there? How long did you stay for?
   1. Michael Little, farm?
   2. Fukuoka visited a farm in Auroville that Krish visited
   3. Kylus Kasanada(?) style list
   4. Stayed with Thomas (from Annapurna?) on a farm
2. What moved you to start your own farm based on natural farming? Did you consider other practices?
3. How would you define natural farming?
4. Do you have any western scientific knowledge that you feel has helped you understand nature intuitively? If you could go back, would you have studied anything else?

Solitude Farm

1. What was the land like before you began farming on it? What was it used for previously? In particular, how degraded or fertile was the soil?
2. How did natural farming inform your early land stewardship?
   1. Black velvet bean for ground cover
   2. Clay soil made open seeding like seedbombing if you walked on it
   3. Too little rice, sparse crop (not homogenous), but too much rice, ???
   4. Tried peanuts for ground cover, rice can be 3-6+ months but tried a 3 month rice crop
   5. Aim for 4 month-long intensive rotation of vegetables and grains
3. How did the ecosystem change over time?
   1. Jackfruit, custard apple, yams, etc started growing on their own
   2. The things that grow on their own have the most nutritional value and taste
4. Did your practice change with the land? Do you feel you've deviated from natural farming (as described by Fukuoka) in any meaningful way?
5. What were the biggest challenges to making Solitude the farm it is today?

Natural farming in the context of desertification and the future of farming

1. Do you believe that natural farming is sufficient to combat desertification?
2. How do you see natural farming intersecting with the ecological problem of native habitat restoration? Are some ecosystems "too far gone" (that is, too dominated by non-native species), and if so, how do you draw the line? What is the value you see in native habitat restoration, especially when it might be contrasted with people's conventional notions of food production (and what plants count as "food")?
3. How do you see natural farming intersecting with economy and community? Solitude Farm is a thriving farm-to-plate with a brilliant community of transient travellers. Did you intentionally develop the community and economy of the project, or did it arise naturally?

Finding a meaningful life, and the spirituality of natural farming

1. What was it like to live on Fukuoka's farm in the way of life there? Was it curiosity that occupied your mind, contentedness, or something else? Do you feel you've recreated this way of life at Solitude farm, or is it something different?
2. How do you experience the spiritual or meaningful bounty of natural farming that Fukuoka described?
3. What do you think it would take for a city-dweller with no gardening experience to experience this for themselves?
4. Do you agree with Fukuoka that life would be better for all if most people returned to being farmers? Or are some people just "not meant for farming"?

The interview

• quality all comes back to the soil, including the communiyt
• eating local induces culture
• karnatik music is what all the top musos want to study
• strong cultural knowledge for how to use weeds etc is essential. thumbprint reading in tamil-nadu, they can tell you your parents' name,what was this called, where
• soil restoration, what did you notice over time?
• dopamine beans, look that up
• uterus beans that cure diabetes

focus qs

• reclaiming culture, permitting weeds, knowing how to make use of them.
  • that is essential
• soil rehabilitation. solitude soil was not very degraded, "maniveli sandy loam".
  • over the years its become so much better
• how many people would have to farm (full time or not) to grow food for 10 people?
• water access and natural irrigation
  • solitude is at the bottom of a catchment/plateau, always had pretty good water
  • one summer the well was empty, which was shocking
  • water holes
  • dug out the well with tnt to make it deeper
  • kirik(?) from auroville has dug many catchments in auroville. ask indigenous people how to catch water
  • you must look at the water catchment above and beside your farm too
  • the water table is higher than before
  • they used black wattle (or actually silver wattle)
• deciding what to grow for a sufficient diet, macros diet
  • krish doesn't believe that it's necessary to use macro diets. are there alternative models in indigenous cultures that lived a while? or another question: does it even make sense to aim for diets that maximise the length of life? what about maximising for quality of life first?