Natural Farming

As another extended example of poiesis in action, this chapter reviews an approach to farming developed by Masanobu Fukuoka in Japan after World War II. Fukuoka’s route to so-called natural farming hinged on staging deliberate dances of agency between Fukuoka and his land, which eventually settled down as technique to a choreography of agency, plugging the farmer into the rhythms of nature. This chapter also discusses the practical difficulties of the transition from the traditional enframing approach to farming to a poetic one. The chapter reviews Fukuoka’s critique of modern science, as well the relevance of cybernetic and Daoist thought.