The use of epic narratives in promoting ‘natural agriculture’

We focus on four cases – Masanobu Fukuoka, Wes Jackson, Alan Savory, and J.I. and Robert Rodale – selected because they have arguably played important, although quite different, roles in promoting agriculture's (re)turn to nature. Other names could have been selected, for example Sir Albert Howard for his important work on compost and organic farming (Barton, 2001; Howard, 1943), or Rudolf Steiner for the development and promotion of biodynamic agriculture (Paull, 2011; Vogt, 2007). However, we concluded that our argument could be better illustrated through a focus on more contemporary individuals.

Masanobu Fukuoka (1913–2008) was a Japanese farmer and author who developed and promoted a philosophy and a practice of ‘natural farming’ (Fukuoka, 1985). His book, The One Straw Revolution (Fukuoka, 1978),¹ introduced his ideas to readers around the world, and continues to occupy a central place in the alternative agriculture corpus. Fukuoka's natural farming is presented as much more than a collection of principles or techniques – it is a philosophy, a way of living and being in nature. ‘Ultimately, it is not the growing technique which is the most important factor, but rather the state of mind of the farmer’ (Fukuoka, 1978: 45). Some of his results were published in agricultural journals, and his work ‘appeared often in print and was introduced to the public at large on radio and television programmes many times, but nobody paid much attention to it’ (Fukuoka, 1978: 20).

Wes Jackson (1936–) is a leading American promoter of sustainable agriculture, and champions ‘natural systems agriculture’. Jackson was born in Kansas (1936), where he undertook his first degree in biology and postgraduate studies in botany. Having completed a PhD in genetics at North Carolina State University and chaired one of the first environmental studies programmes at California State University, Sacramento, Jackson returned to Kansas where he co-founded The Land Institute in 1976 as a non-profit research and educational organisation. The institute's goal is ‘to create an agriculture system that mimics natural systems in order to produce ample food and reduce or eliminate the negative impacts of industrial agriculture’ (The Land Institute, n.d.). Jackson has published several books, but it was in his second book, New Roots for Agriculture (Jackson, 1980) that a distinctive contribution started to take shape. His natural systems agriculture model centres on developing perennial grain crops and polyculture farming solutions based on the grains and grasses native to a place and grown in an ‘ecologically intensified’ manner (The Land Institute, n.d.).

The Rodale family is often linked to the beginnings of the organic farming movement in the US. Jerome Irvin (J.I.) Rodale (1898–1971) was a New York City entrepreneur who owned a publishing house (Rodale Press). Because of poor health, in 1940 he bought a run-down farm in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, which was the site for his first experiments with organic agriculture, part of his resolve to pursue an active and healthy lifestyle. In 1942, Rodale Press launched the magazine Organic Farming and Gardening (which still exists today as Organic Gardening), and in 1947 the Soil and Health Foundation, later renamed as the Rodale Institute, was founded. In 1971, the New York Times featured J.I. as ‘The Guru of the Organic Food Cult’ (Greene, 1971). Upon J.I.'s death, the business was taken over by his son, Robert Rodale (1930–1990), who had grown up on the farm at Emmaus and joined Rodale Press as editor at the age of 21. Robert expanded the organic farming experiments by setting up a new site where the Rodale Institute would eventually be located. He oversaw the establishment of the Farming Systems Trial in 1981, and the rebranding of the institute around the notion of ‘regenerative organic’ farming. The trial compares two organic farming systems – manure-based and legume-based approaches – to conventional farming methods. Robert coined the term ‘regenerative organic agriculture’ as a practice that ‘takes advantage of the natural tendencies of ecosystems to regenerate when disturbed’ and that favours ‘closed nutrient loops, greater diversity in the biological community, fewer annuals and more perennials, and greater reliance on internal rather than external resources’ (Rodale Institute, 2014: 7).

Allan Savory (1935–), the President and co-founder of the Savory Institute in Colorado, has been a controversial figure in the world of rangeland science and management for over five decades (Gosnell et al., 2020; Holechek et al., 2000; Joseph et al., 2002). In contrast to the others profiled in this paper, Savory does not use the language of natural systems agriculture, biomimicry or nature-based solutions. Nevertheless, the short duration grazing method he has promoted since the 1970s, and which he suggests is based on observation of the grazing behaviour of wildlife (Savory, 1983: 156), has in recent years come to figure prominently in discourse around both regenerative agriculture and natural systems agriculture. Beginning in the early 1980s, Savory published a number of papers about his ‘Savory Grazing Method’ or ‘Holistic Resource Management’ in academic and professional journals (Savory, 1978, 1979, 1983; Savory and Parsons, 1980). However, the book, Holistic Resource Management (1981) was a first attempt to speak to a wider audience.

In many ways, this element is the starting point of all epic narratives. It is the origin story, centred on heroic figures, that drives the narrative. It usually combines a specific moment of crisis, insight or clarity, with a subsequent quest or journey into the unknown. The journey articulates around a central tension between aimless wandering in the wilderness with repeated failures and setbacks on the one hand, and the personal qualities of resolve, persistence, tenacity, and single-mindedness on the other. This element is particularly relevant in relation to Fukuoka, Jackson and Savory.

Fukuoka wrote in detail about the events that set him on his journey towards natural farming (Fukuoka, 1978, 2012). Upon graduating from agricultural college in plant pathology, he worked for the government inspecting plant material as it entered or left his country, Japan. After three years he suffered from an acute case of pneumonia. His recovery caused him to question ‘the meaning of human existence’. One night he wandered aimlessly, and at dawn found himself under a tree overlooking the harbour.

‘Suddenly the piercing call of a night heron awakened me as if from a dream. All of the confusion, all the agony that possessed me disappeared with the morning mist. Something I call “true nature” was revealed. I had been transformed, body and soul. […] I saw nature directly. It was pure and radiant, what I imagined heaven to be.’ (Fukuoka, 2012: 2)

He immediately quit his job at the Customs Bureau and spent time travelling and living in a lakeshore hut. In talking with others, he ‘could see that [his] ideas were at odds with the way the rest of society was thinking’, and he was told he was deluding himself – ‘I learned it was better to remain silent’. And as time went by the ‘pure vision of nature’ weakened. He then returned to his parents’ farm: ‘I began living alone in a hut in the citrus orchard, and decided to start a natural farm to express what I had seen that morning in physical form’ (Fukuoka, 2012: 5).

His early attempts at natural farming – ‘simply doing nothing’ – resulted in the death of more that 200 citrus trees. Encouraged by his father, Fukuoka again took up his post as a government plant pathologist. With the end of World War 2 he returned to the farm, ‘Since that time, I have been a farmer, never veering from the path of natural farming. I experienced many failures […] but I persisted’ (Fukuoka, 2012: 7).

A moment of awakening is central to Jackson's narration of his personal journey. In his talk ‘Framework of the Future’, he recalls his encounter, at the age of sixteen, with the native prairie and the ‘pitiful reality’ of Native Americans in White River, South Dakota (The Land Institute, 2017). This experience started him thinking about the need for a new cosmology, which, as highlighted by his reference to ‘A song of ascents’ (Psalm 121), sees nature as creator, protector, and redeemer of humans on earth (ibid). Jackson's first book, Man and the Environment (Jackson, 1971), signals the direction of travel towards an alternative. This edited collection of essays illustrates his awakening to the environmental question, in a context of growing civil rights and environmental movements in the US.

At the age 40 Jackson left academia and established The Land Institute. The return home marked another step in the process of soul searching, specifically the reengagement with his roots in the prairies of Kansas. His focus was the landscape surrounding Salina, which highlighted the need for perennial polycultures. However, while the work of the Land Institute focused on agronomy, breeding and ecology, Jackson's quest to become ‘native to his place’ was more expansive (Jackson, 1994). To develop an alternative to ‘industrial agriculture’ necessitated ‘a coherent community that is in tum embedded in the ecological realities of its surrounding landscape’ (Jackson, 1994: 3). This is the essence, and the challenge, of his vision of natural systems agriculture, the primary feature of which is to:

‘sufficiently mimic the natural structure to be granted the function of its components. Domesticating wild perennials and increasing seed yield and at the same time perennializing the major crops to be planted as domestic prairies is a major goal’ (Jackson, 2002: 111)

Savory describes how as a 20-year-old graduate (zoology and botany) who, newly appointed to a post with the Northern Rhodesian Game Department, had a ‘naive’ dream of a career working in ‘my beloved African bush among the marvellous animals’. But that dream was shattered ‘simply because I cared […] I began to see things as they really were and to realise that all I loved was doomed’ (p. xix). This was the beginning of an ‘often very lonely’, ‘long struggle’ (the book was published when he was 58-years-old), ‘to find solutions to the deterioration I saw everywhere’. In this struggle he was pitted against the ‘ignorance of professional bureaucrats’ (p. xix) and other ‘professional people’, including scientists, who could not see that their endless ‘quick-fix solutions’ were making environmental degradation worse, and who ‘don't like to admit ignorance or to raise the questions I did’ (p. xix). The challenge was to break the shackles of narrow disciplines and damaging orthodoxies, and to learn anew: ‘The old adage that the greatest block to learning is knowledge certainly holds true and can block even the most open-mind, as I know from my own experience’ (p. xxiii).²

While the awakening moment is less prominent in the Rodale family history, J.I. Rodale's struggle with ill health is recounted as the reason for him to move from New York City to Emmaus and purse a healthy lifestyle around organic gardening and farming. Also, the family history that frames the Rodale Institute's heritage, provides a sense of a founding moment and a journey involving momentous world events:

‘Developing and demonstrating practical, natural methods of rebuilding soil fertility became J.I. Rodale's primary goal when World War II's sudden shortage of nitrogen fertilizer – as it was diverted to making munitions – exposed the nutrient poverty and poor health of the nation's soil’ (Rodale Institute, n.d.a, n.d.b: 8).

This epic element highlights the principles or higher forces that guide the hero through the wilderness, support him in his struggles, and demonstrate that his cause is just. These principles and forces are sources of inspiration and strength, as well as legitimacy and authority. In our cases, nature tends to play this role.

Fukuoka's natural farming is based on four simple ‘principles’: no cultivation (no ploughing or turning the soil), no chemical fertiliser or prepared compost, no weeding by tillage or herbicide, and no dependence on chemicals. They were identified not through scientific experimentation, but by several decades of ‘sitting back, observing nature's method of cultivation and fertilisation’ (Fukuoka, 1978: 36). Fukuoka suggests the principles ‘comply with the natural order and lead to the replenishment of nature's richness’ (p. 40). Natural farming does not arise from reading or interpreting nature's laws, but rather ‘of itself when a unity exists between man and nature’. It complies with nature ‘as it is’, ‘that is, nature as apprehended by the non-discriminating mind’ (i.e. without conscious effort or interpretation by the intellect³). Nature is in the driver's seat – there can be no greater legitimation.

In addition to the Psalms, Jackson's guiding light is the idea of ‘nature as standard’ (i.e. as a guide for morals, law and society) (Jackson, 2002). He draws on a historical review by his mentor, American writer Wendell Berry (1990), who traced the history ‘nature as standard’ in literary and scientific history. Berry suggest this paradigm can be seen as far back as the book of Job: ‘… ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee’ (Jackson, 2002: 114). Jackson also draws on the work of various scientists from throughout the 20th century who highlighted the importance of learning from nature and mother earth's own ways. Thus, for The Land Institute, Jackson argues that the ‘never-plowed native prairie serves as our teacher’ (ibid: 115).

The barrier created by science is also a recurrent theme in Jackson's thinking. He talks about ‘the hardware of the annual’ that is deeply embedded in the agricultural sciences. His critique of agronomy is that it works to mitigate the consequences of disturbances rather than towards an ecological agriculture that functions with ‘perennial hardware’ (The Land Institute, 2014).

Rodale's high ground is associated with its role in establishing organic farming in North America. ‘Since 1947, Rodale Institute has taken the lead to promote a better, natural, and more responsible way of modern farming by conducting research into the cultivation of healthy, living soils. Way back then we called the approach ‘organic’ – and an entire movement was born’ (Rodale Institute, n.d.a, n.d.b: 4). The Rodale Institute also coined the term ‘regenerative organic agriculture’ and claims to have the longest-running side-by-side comparison of organic and conventional grain cropping systems in North America (Rodale Institute, 2014, n.d.a, n.d.b).

In explaining and promoting Holistic Resource Management, Savory highlights the importance of the ‘ecological principles’ which underpin it. And it is because his approach acknowledges and respects these principles, it is fully aligned with nature: ‘We now operate within Nature's laws’ (p. xxii). Being guided by ecological principles and respecting the nature's laws allows Savory to be full of confidence. The dismal past, when no one knew how to manage land and keep it healthy, will quickly fade: ‘In the end we cannot fail because we will not let ourselves fail’ (p. xxii).

The epic element of broad or universal significance is central to the construction of an epic narrative: it removes the hero's struggles, insights, and solutions from the realm of the mundane, the everyday and the local. Claims to universal significance scream-out to be taken seriously. In a sense, they are the ultimate answer to the demand for ‘impact at scale’ and the imperative to ‘feed the world’. As is evident in what follows, they also sit in tension with the need to take local context into account.

As noted above, Fukuoka described his natural farming in terms of four ‘principles’. Significantly, he was explicit that these principles, and the underpinning philosophy, were universally applicable. For example, his method of growing rice and winter grain had been ‘tested over a wide range of climates and natural conditions. Almost every prefecture in Japan has run tests comparing yields of ‘direct seeding non-cultivation’ with those of paddy rice growing and the usual ridge and furrow rye and barley cultivation. These tests have produced no evidence to contradict the universal applicability of natural farming’ (Fukuoka, 1978: 22).

It is important to note that Fukuoka's understanding of universal applicability did not imply the rigid application of a particular set of techniques through which the principles were to be operationalised:

‘This way of farming has evolved according to the natural conditions of the Japanese islands, but I feel that natural farming could also be applied in other areas and to the raising of other indigenous crops. In areas where water is not so readily available, for example, upland rice or other grains such as buckwheat, sorghum or millet might be grown. Instead of white clover, another variety of clover, alfalfa, vetch or lupine might prove a more suitable field cover. Natural farming takes a distinctive form in accordance with the unique conditions of the area in which it is applied.’(Fukuoka, 1978: 45)

In his Preface to The One Straw Revolution, Wendell Berry apparently felt the need to further nuance Fukuoka's claim of universal applicability for American readers:

‘Knowledgeable readers will be aware that Mr Fukuoka's techniques will not be directly applicable to most American farms. But it would be a mistake to assume that the practical passages of this book are worthless to us for that reason. They deserve our attention because they provide an excellent example of what can be done when land, climate, and crops are studied with fresh interest, clear eyes, and the right kind of concern. They are valuable to us also because they are suggestive and inspiring. Any farmer who reads them will find his thoughts lured repeatedly from the page to his own fields, and from there, making connections, to the entire system of American agriculture.’ (Fukuoka, 1978: ix)

Strong claims for universal applicability are also made in Fukuoka's later book, Sowing Seeds in the Desert (Fukuoka, 2012). This volume focuses on the use of his natural farming approach to revegetating ‘deserts’ and land that had been degraded through desertification. The intent is clear in the sub-title: Natural Farming, Global Restoration and Ultimate Food Security:

‘For over fifty years or so, I have grown crops without tilling the soil and without fertilizers or agricultural chemicals. I have done practically nothing, and the soil in my fields has become the best in my village. I simply scattered seeds in clay pellets, covered them with straw, and grew a healthy ground cover including white clover and vetch. I supplied nature with the tools, and then I relied on nature's disposition toward fertility. I believe this basic method will also work in revegetating the deserts’ (p. 64). […] ‘… I realize that the techniques I developed over those many years in Japan could, in fact, be used effectively to counteract desertification’ (p. 85). […] ‘My measures for countering desertification are exactly the same as the basic natural farming method. One can refer to it as natural farming evolution whose goal is to return the earth to the paradise it once was’ (p. 70).

On the basis of these claims, Fukuoka travelled widely (Somalia, Ethiopia, India, Thailand, the US) and promoted his methods for the reclamation of desert lands.

Jackson also lays the mantle of universal significance on the principles of natural systems agriculture as developed on the Kansas prairie. Like Fukuoka, he highlights the need for local adaptation of these principles:

‘The implications and potential impact of this work are global. By demonstrating underling principles rather than practical applications only, the research has shown that the “natural systems” approach could be transferable worldwide, as long as adequate research is devoted to developing species and mixtures of species appropriate to specific environments.’ (Jackson, 2002: 115)

In Jackson's view, there is no room for doubt about the significance of the ‘natural systems’ approach: ‘Here is the prototypical ecosystem towards solving the 10,000-year-old problem of agriculture’⁴ (Jackson, 2002: 116).

While Savory's journey started in the bush of Northern Rhodesia, over time it took on much greater significance. Savory tells his readers that ‘… I learned that what I saw in the destruction of wildlife reflects the condition of humanity and all other life on the planet. The wildlife problems that I first grappled with were little more than advance gusts of violent storms that will ultimately threaten the whole world’ (Savory, 1988: xix). Further, ‘in both developed and developing countries, our resources of land, water, air, and living organisms deteriorate. And I am not aware of any place where the degradation is being halted […] no one knows how to manage land and keep it healthy’ (p. xx).

But if the crisis is both acute and universal, Holistic Resource Management, born from Savory's lonely journey through the professional wilderness, ‘is successful’ and ‘applies universally’ (p. xxi). He elaborates further: ‘Holistic Resource Management will function for any people in any place, and the HRM model will work regardless of religion, system of government, economic base, or climate (p. 498). All of which underlines the importance of his book, that at once ‘answers the challenge to find an approach that treats people and their environment as a whole’ (p. xxi), and seeks to spread ‘ideas of practical holism beyond roots in the day-to-day management of land and into the realm of broader questions […] the questions raised affect everyone’ (p. xxii). In contrast with Savory's own experience of leaving university with ‘the will but not the tools’ (p. xxiv), ‘now, if they [students] have the will, Holistic Resource Management will indicate the best tools at any time and guide the process to succeed’ (p. xxiv).

Claims of universal significance have perhaps been the most far reaching in the case of the Rodale Institute as regenerative agriculture has become a globalised concept (Giller et al., 2021; Rhodes, 2012, 2017), with narratives suggesting that regenerative organic farming can feed the world (Francis et al., 1986; Rhodes, 2012) and offer a solution to climate change (Rodale Institute, 2014: 2). In a promotional video, a member of staff voices the Institute's grand mission:

‘what drives me and what drives the work of Rodale Institute is the fact that our work literally holds in it one of the solutions to the world's greatest problem right now.’ (a Rodale employee, The Rodale Institute, 2016)

The universal applicability of regenerative organic practices is framed around three principles: (1) the inter-relatedness of all parts of a farming system, including the farmer and farm family; (2) the importance of biological balances in the system; and (3) the need to maximise desired biological relationships in the system, and minimise the use of materials and practices that disrupt those relationships (Francis et al., 1986). The suggestion is that these principles are relevant to farming systems across the developing world.