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Natural Farming and Permaculture-an essay introduction

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At Caretaker Farm since the beginning of my time there in 1989 I have tried to follow the natural farming recommended and practiced by Masanobu Fukuoka-his book the One Straw Revolution which I read in the early 1980s  had a huge impact on the way I thought about and interacted with nature.  Later I discovered Permaculture with its design planning system using zones and organic methods. As a result I  use a combination of both methods in what I am trying to create on Caretaker Farm in NZ. In this essay I will describe and explain permaculture as I understand it after having attended a two week Permaculture Design course in the north of New Zealand back in 2005 and have implemented on Caretaker Farm, Whangateau, Aotearoa(NZ).  Permaculture was developed by two Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, as a response to pollution of the soil, water and air; the increasing reduction of non-renewable resources; the continued loss of animal and plant species and;...
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Natural Farming-the wisdom of Masanobu Fukuoka

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Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008) was a Japanese philosopher and farmer from the Island of Shikoku. He used what can be called natural farming techniques which went against the usual ploughing, tillage and scientific agricultural methods used so much today Natural farming requires no machinery or fossil fuels, no chemicals, no prepared compost and very little weeding. Even though his methods were controversial-i.e he did not plough the soil or hold water in his fields of rice as other farmers-he managed on his farm to achieve yields either comparable to or higher than the most productive Japanese farms at the time. Natural farming creates no pollution and actually improves the fertility of the soil every season which of course poses a threat to scientific and business in agriculture where they push fertilisers and pesticides and of course machinery to till the land or irrigate. On Caretaker farm I have tried to follow some of the principles expressed by Fukuoka in his book "The O...
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The aftermath of cyclone Lusi

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Monday March 17 -St Patricks Day We passed through Cyclone Lusi with little physical damage around the farm despite wind gusts of around 130km-the tent over the community earth oven flew at times and flapped loudly to those gusts as they blew through from the north east. We didn’t receive much rain, only 30 ml, but enough to give the hungry plants a small dram to refresh them after two months of only 120ml of rain. With the changing climate the extremes are intense at times between the wet and dry periods but overall it is discernibly drier each year. The cyclone seemed to have an unsettling effect on the wwoofing fraternity that were here as two British guys who arrived on the Friday ended up leaving on the Saturday and taking with them a Japanese girl who had arrived only a couple of days earlier. Then another girl, this time from the Netherlands, after only a week of being here when she was going to stay for a month, said that she also would leave, as she was “sensitive ...
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