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The One-Straw Revolution is actually a pretty amazing read[1]. As makers, founders, and people that "want to make the world a better place", there's no better place to start than Fukuoka's treatise on sustainable farming.

[1] http://www.appropedia.org/images/d/d3/Onestraw.pdf

The One Straw Revolution has been very inspiring for me. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to learn about natural farming.

I will definitely read it, thanks.

Related, i can't recommend enough "The One-Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka for people interested in that topic and don't know about it.

https://archive.org/details/The-One-Straw-Revolution/page/n1...

I recently read “The One Straw Revolution” by Masanobu Fukuoka [1] and a lot of the technique seems to be around making sure the soil is cultivated for letting mycelium and bacteria do their thing. Mycorrhizal fungi seems to play a huge role in soil carbon storage, which is disrupted in modern agricultural practices [2].

[1]https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-one-straw-revolution?varia...

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_fungi_and_soil_c...

A few of his videos:

The incredible values of edible weeds.
https://youtu.be/Ne39EwOffOU

20 types of Greens to eat during Lockdown!

https://youtu.be/g1_omHjjdMs

LOW EFFORT, Easy To Grow Plants in a Permaculture Food Forest, Circle Garden & Perennial Hedge

https://youtu.be/eq7ASQSVjGQ

The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka ~ CHAPTER 7 & 8 read by Krishna McKenzie

https://youtu.be/Ow4vqB1uODY

Agreed. Fukuoka's classic The One Straw Revolution is also excellent reading. He was a trained biologist who then moved toward a more holistic and philosophically based approach to land management, reaping huge benefits. You can view his work as agricultural process hacking. His five principles:

(1) human cultivation of soil, plowing or tilling are unnecessary, as is the use of powered machines

(2) prepared fertilizers are unnecessary, as is the process of preparing compost

(3) weeding, either by cultivation or by herbicides, is unnecessary. Instead only minimal weed suppression with minimal disturbance

(4) applications of pesticides or herbicides are unnecessary

(5) pruning of fruit trees is unnecessary

I completely agree on this. If anyone's interested, consider reading "The One Straw Revolution" which emphasises how all these modern techniques which both disturbs the soil and then makes an effort to remedy it afterwards is completely unnecessary. I wonder why this comment is downvoted so much. Has HN become too intellectual and superficial?

The book that got me into this was Mark Shepard's 'Restoration Agriculture". [1] His "New Forest Farm" in WI has been making use of these ideas for some time now. [2]

Shepard got his inspiration from Permaculture [3] and the books, "Tree Crops", [4] and "The One Straw Revolution". [5]

1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16441733-restoration-agr...

2: https://newforestfarm.us

3: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/381988.Permaculture

4: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714112.Tree_Crops

5: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Rev...

If anyone hasn't read it, check out The One Straw Revolution, and compare to this approach.

The author of the famous natural farming manifesto The One-Straw Revolution[0], Masanobu Fukuoka[1], was a microbiologist assigned by the Japanese army to evaluate the edibility of various insects encountered by the army as they spread across Southeast Asia. He concluded that almost all of them were edible.

I tried a cricket burger recently at the F&A Next[2] event at Wageningen, Europe's pre-eminent agricultural university[1], which may have even been sourced from the farm in this article. While the taste was OK, I literally woke up early in the morning with stomach pain.

[0] http://www.appropedia.org/images/d/d3/Onestraw.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wageningen_University_and_Rese...

Another such farmer like Gabe, JM, Richard etc. above, is Krishna McKenzie, Solitude Farm, Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India. Englishman who studied as a kid in a J. Krishnamurti school in England, came to Auroville ~20 years ago, started Solitude with friends, and has been there ever since. Inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka and his book, One Straw revolution. Has met him. Mixed crops, fruit trees, grains (including millets), many vegetables including common ones, plus less-known but traditionally eaten high-food-and-medicinal-value indigenous local and Indian ones, some in regular beds, some intermixed in a food forest, again utilizing more layers of sunlight and underground soil than single layer traditional monoculture. Again, has intern program, video channel, trains others in the community, gives talks, runs a popular on-premise vegan and raw food restaurant supplied by the farm itself.

Nowadays doing more training work and helping others in the area to bootstrap community permaculture gardens, since there is much more interest in food security, local food, lowering food miles, traditional-but-forgotten-plants-as-food, weeds as food, etc., since the coronavirus pandemic started.