permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>]

Land, Farmer, Community: A Sacred Trust

 BY LISA M. HAMILTON

Published in the September/October 2007
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/333
issue of /Orion/ magazine

Land, Farmer, Community: A Sacred Trust
To Create Heaven on Earth

Susumu Hashimoto is the happiest person I’ve ever met. His smile is
constant and electric. Even in the rain, his face seems to glow.

He attributes his deep joy to being a farmer, a life he began
envisioning at seventeen. Considering that farming in many places is
characterized by debt, dispossession, and even suicide, it struck me as
odd for a city boy to dream of agriculture. And yet that was Hashimoto:
he saved up money for years working as a deliveryman, all for the chance
to rent a scattering of fields in a village fifty miles south of Osaka,
Japan. He’s thirty-seven now, and sure he’ll be a farmer forever.

Hashimoto will gladly—/gleefully/—explain. “What I do is more than
farming. It’s learning how to care for life and improve society,” he
told me. “I believe the farmer is the closest servant to God.”

Intrigued, I asked him what he hoped to accomplish through his work.
“World peace,” he replied, then smiled and waited for the next question,
as if there were nothing more to say.

Hashimoto is not alone. What he does is called /shizen nouhou/, or
natural agriculture. It’s part of the devotional practice of the
spiritual group Shumei, which claims 370,000 members in Japan and around
the world.

I was writing a book about natural agriculture when I met Hashimoto, and
the research felt like cracking a code. Whenever I asked about someone’s
practical objectives, I got an answer as enigmatic as Hashimoto’s. While
interviewing a panel of natural agriculture’s official leaders, all of
them in gray suits, none of them speaking English, I asked the question,
“What are your short- and long-term goals?”

Their interpreter replied, “We have only one goal: to create heaven on
Earth.”

After months of perplexing conversation I realized the problem. I was
approaching natural agriculture as a way of farming, like dry-farming or
biodynamics. Instead, I needed to absorb the critical piece that
Hashimoto had offered: natural agriculture is more than farming.

The practice is based on the teachings of Mokichi Okada, whose unique
philosophy came as a response to living through the two world wars. He
believed that healing the world would come from relearning how to
respect life. One of the avenues Okada chose for this was agriculture,
which he saw as humans’ fundamental connection to the natural world. He
taught that humans ought to stop treating the Earth as a thing to
subjugate and instead adopt a relationship of humble coexistence.
Through his new way of growing and eating food, humans would learn to
trust in the Earth to sustain them, and in return agree to care for it.
As people learned to show respect, gratitude, and compassion toward the
natural world, they would do the same for all beings, including their
fellow humans. So while on the surface natural agriculture looks like
plain old farming—planting, harvesting, selling—it is actually, as
Hashimoto said, a way of learning to care for life and improve society.

Rather than try to control their land, natural agriculture farmers
largely surrender themselves to their environment. When insects descend,
for instance, instead of spraying the pests, farmers watch them, trying
to learn how to make the plant stronger so it can withstand future
pests—even at the expense of the crop in the field. They eschew
additives of any kind, including compost.

In their eyes, adding something to the land means you don’t trust its
inherent power. Instead, they rearrange their plans to work with what
the soil gives them naturally. It means lower yields, but their goal is
not quantity; it is to cultivate compassion, respect, and gratitude.

While the food these farmers produce is a sacrament, it’s also the daily
bread for thousands of nonfarming Shumei members. In the greater Tokyo
area, a network of eleven farmers feeds fifteen hundred urban families,
supplying all their produce, rice, and soybeans.

Were the farmers going it alone, they would fail; the growing practice
requires too much labor for too little product to sustain a conventional
business. What makes natural agriculture work is that it’s practiced by
farmers and consumers alike. While the farmers farm, the consumers
create a support system that enables the farmers to focus on spiritual
priorities rather than production. The traditional hierarchy of
agriculture—land serves farmers, farmers serve consumers—is replaced
with a three-way partnership.

Consumers run the distribution system. They take orders, collect money,
package, sort, and deliver. They publish newsletters, organize farm
tours, and host celebrations. Because supporting the farmers means
adopting a seasonal diet, they give cooking classes. To replace
commercially processed foods like miso and tofu, they learn to process
soybeans at home. And when farmers need them in the field, they become
farmers, too.

Hashimoto tells a story from a few years ago, when he was barely
breaking even. He wanted to plant more rice, but could hardly keep up
with the weeds in the paddies he already had. Then it came to him: he
would rent more fields and adopt them out to his customers. After he
planted, they would do the weeding, as well as contract to buy a year’s
worth of the rice at a price that reflected their paddy’s total
yield—incentive to do their work well.

His customers weren’t naturally drawn to farming—these were people with
clean fingernails and suburban lives—but Hashimoto convinced them with
his fervor.

Ten people signed up, and throughout the summer they worked, barefoot
and bent over in the blazing sun. They spent far more time there than
anyone had predicted; some drove five hours just to get to the farm. In
the end, the price for their rice was markedly higher than in a
supermarket, even for organic. By conventional standards, not a great deal.

Yet the next year they all signed up again. Turns out they had enjoyed
every minute. They had brought their whole families, and their children
had relished the chance to catch frogs and squish mud through their
toes. The families had asked Hashimoto to teach them to do more than weed.

One man, Hideki Oonishi, had even driven out in winter to visit his
fallow field. After planting the next spring, Hashimoto watched him
photograph the seedlings as if they were his children.

The extra rice kept Hashimoto in business, but what mattered more to him
was the new crop of people in his fields. He explained that as a natural
agriculture farmer his work is to care deeply for plants and land; in
doing so he produces not just food, but love. Every person who joined
him meant that love multiplied. He told me that little by little—family
by family—that love would lead to something bigger. Then he smiled, and
there was nothing more to say.