In my twenties, I wondered what richness really is, and read a great many books. I also went to meet many activists and artists.
This was several years before I started growing rice by natural farming.
Among those books I came across one about Jōren Matsui, "Owari yori hajimaru" (Beginning from the end).
It records a place of learning and practice in post-war Japan, Mugi no Ie ("the house of wheat"), where people who felt drawn to the "thought and living" expressed there gathered to study.
I remember reading it and resolving that, whatever else, I would try it in practice — I would get down on the ground.
To re-examine myself, standing as I was on modern rationalism, I thought the thing to do was the exact opposite. For tools, a hoe, a spade and a sickle would be enough.
But I had never grown rice in my life.
Neither my parents nor my relatives had rice fields.
Rice work with no pesticides and no machines.
I learned it is generally called natural farming,
searched the internet from one end to the other, read every related book in the library,
and whenever a study meeting was held nearby, I went.
Natural farming changes with the place and with the person doing it,
so I think it is something like a living organism.
And that, I think, is precisely what is natural about it.
Fourteen years ago, I rented abandoned farmland and began growing rice with no machines and no pesticides.
It started as wasteland, with reeds three metres tall and the ridges collapsed by animal trails.
What I write in this series is about old-style paddies that have never been through land consolidation.
If you are restoring a consolidated, rectangular field, the situation will differ.
Even so, tending to the field according to its situation is what natural farming is. Please read it across to your own field.
I have written all of it down on my blog. When I counted, there were 1,359 posts.
Beds four metres wide, dig to the depth of a spade, one bed per hour — the real measurements are there.
The years it dried out, the years the animals ate it — written down just as they happened.
I'm re-weaving these records into a practical handbook in order of the work, and serialising it here.
Once the series has come full circle, I plan to gather it into a single Kindle book.
Contents of the series
As each chapter is published, I'll add the link here.
Chapter titles may change as the writing progresses.
・Prologue: What is natural farming?
・Chapter 1 Finding a field — what I want to hold dear
・Chapter 2 Clearing — restoring abandoned farmland
・Chapter 3 Water — the warp and weft of relationships
・Chapter 4 Wildlife damage — countermeasures and acceptance
・Chapter 5 Seed rice — passing life on
・Chapter 6 Seedlings — tending them like a newborn
・Chapter 7 Planting — one seedling at a time, with gratitude
・Chapter 8 Weeds — a home for insects
・Chapter 9 Watching over — from heading to harvest time
・Chapter 10 Harvest — receiving the blessing
・Chapter 11 Hanging to dry — letting the sun do the drying
・Chapter 12 Threshing, hulling, storing — the last job
・Chapter 13 Putting away, giving back — the cycle of life
・Chapter 14 Eating — receiving life
・Epilogue: 14 years of fixed-point observation — natural farming from here on. Climate change and the possibility of upland rice
The shape of each chapter
Every chapter follows the same flow.
・How to do it (timing, tools, sequence)
・Fourteen years of failures and what I did about them
・A short column at the end
I don't intend to write only about what went well.
In 2016 the yield was 160 kg. "I don't think this yield is good. But it is good enough," I wrote at the time.
In 2021 it was 50 sacks of 30 kg — 1,500 kg.
In 2025, with the drought, "a year's supply may be impossible." It was.
Make my failures your nourishment too, and build the field of your ideals.
The first instalment begins with "Clearing — restoring abandoned farmland".
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📚 See also
🌱 Digital DIY course materials (in Japanese)
・[Free] Site Controller Build Guide
→ https://brain-market.com/u/kinako666/a/b4cDO1UjMgoTZsNWa0JXY
・AI posts for you every day | DIY automated SNS posting in 7 days for 0 yen a month
→ https://brain-market.com/u/kinako666/a/b1MTN3UjMgoTZsNWa0JXY
✉️ Newsletter "Kakuuchi" (entirely handwritten)
Behind-the-scenes stories of daily life, from weeding to using AI.
→ https://flow-yamagen.com/en/mail-magazine/