Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan

by FH King, 441 pages, 5½x8½, softcover. In the early 1900s, former USDA official FH King traveled through China, Korea, and Japan to document how people sustained agriculture for 4000 years without synthetic fertilizer. This book is as much an anthropological artifact as a point-by-point account of local agricultural methods and agricultural economy. The focus on rural smallholders and their ability to produce large diverse yields of marketable and household products using locally available inputs while generating little to no waste offers an inspiring case study that should resonate with contemporary homesteaders and small farmers, even if most of us don’t aspire to build four different versions of water wheel or replicate the 1906 Japanese rice crop. Chapters are organized as a travelog, following King from place to place, but also by specific themes that make skipping around easy if the detail on a particular topic is overwhelming. If the reader is able to look past some dated language and bias, this book has a ton of perspective and practical skills to offer, along with irrefutable evidence of an agriculture dependent on small-scale earth care, free of fossil fuels. An oft-cited classic previously hard to find in print in its entirety. -KH