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.
I have acquaintance who visited Fukuoka while he was alive and who grows rice this way today. I helped him harvest one time. It's hard to estimate just by looking, but his field definitely seemed to have a comparable yield to the neighbours. He's been growing rice in that field for 10-15 years so it's pretty well established.
There were a couple of obvious differences between his field and the neighbours. First it was clear that he had a lot more wildlife in his field: frogs, insects and a lot more spiders. Second, the surrounding fields had been damaged by a typhoon that had come through, while his was in great condition. He surmised that it was because they were using a more modern variety that works better with the fertiliser schedule while he was forced to use an older variety that had a more coarse straw.
He grows all the rice for himself and his wife. His wife has another plot somewhere (that I didn't see) where she grows all the vegetables. They buy fish and meat, etc at the grocery store. He tends to trade a lot with the local orchards for fruit. I'm not entirely sure how much rice he grows -- probably about 3-400 kg. I think the normal yield of rice is about 2.2 kg per m^2 (someone has written an online tonne per hectare to kg per m^2 calculator...!)... which is 200 m^2 or 2100 sq ft, which is basically bang on the size of his field.
We harvested the entire field by hand (just with a little hand scythe). It took a weekend, but was surprisingly easy (we were not rushing in any way). I expected it to be "back breaking work", but it's not at all -- at least for such a small field. We were mostly just hanging out and chatting. I asked him how much work it was the rest of the year. He told me that it took him a day to prepare and plant the seed and that after that it was just about 30 minutes a week to water, etc.
After that he has to thresh the rice and polish it, but he uses machines for that and says that it isn't that much work.
At the very high supermarket prices for rice in Japan, it's probably just worth your time ($1000 worth of rice), but it might be difficult to justify the cost of labour if you were trying to do it commercially.
Of course Fukuoka's idea is that anybody can grow the bulk of their food in their spare time as a kind of light hobby. From what I can tell, that's totally doable. It certainly was an interesting experience for me. I have unfortunately lost track of my acquaintance, but I will be meeting a mutual friend soon, so I'm hoping to reconnect in the future.
This is an amazing story, thanks for sharing! One of the main reasons I love HN is coming across gems like this, and people like you.
When I was young, I would visit a great-aunt in the mountains of rural Transylvania every summer and would help harvest crops, fish, hike, and forage for mushrooms and berries with my grandmother. Now I live in LA and work in tech, often missing that bucolic lifestyle. I just couldn't stop reading about 100 pages straight of One-Straw Revolution this evening -- it reminded me of a simpler, better, time.
I think this really just comes down to: our thoughts are strongly shaped by external details (including our interactions with them). She mentions a few cases of that, but overlooks many others: the articles and books we read, the conversations we have with others, the process of building and interacting with things (whether physical things, or stuff like software), etc. These are all major factors in developing ideas. Our mental processes can't develop ideas without such inputs, and the character of those inputs play a large role in the ideas developed.
I like it, but, how do you grow an idea? I would love to have a formula for that (I know it is impossible, maybe?) but what I see is: putting attention to people and things (which requires to decide where will you put your attention), read, discuss, "produce" and get feedback... What else am I missing?
There are also mathematical models about how ideas emerge [0], with edge-reinforced random walks.
As I understand it, you tend to stay close to familiar concepts, while sometimes being open to new ones. As you revisit a concept, it gets reinforced, allowing you to comfortably spend more time there and opening you to a cluster of new concepts and ideas.
I find the notion of places as a state of mind - cognition that is externalized to your surroundings - quite interesting. So part of a formula could be creating a space that is filled with other ideas, that allows non-judgemental experimentation, actionable research and other people working on similar yet different projects.
So while there is no algorithm to produce ideas, you can consciously work on creating a surrounding in which they may develop 'by themselves'.
One could more broadly observe that many things in Japan uncannily resemble China. That's because they frequently came from China, though its unpopular to point this out. Religion, philosophy, writing, architecture, technology, food, etc. To its credit, Japan has preserved some things lost in the mainland, and does have some interesting endemic culture... it's just a lot smaller portion of modern "Japanese culture" than popularly supposed.
Reading your post, a question comes up to my mind. Just that it resembles and the origin comes from the same place, do we consider PDAs as same as the iPhone era smartphones?
The concept may look similar, but they are very different things in detail, and the latter became the defacto and created a new culture, which makes it important and I think it is enough to call it unique or original.
All I will say to that is that, as programmers, we should learn to distinguish between historically attributable derivation (evidenced fact) and vague conceptual notions such as culture and even more derivative, fuzzy and subjective notions of the potential equality of instance thereof (opine). This is why I spoke in generalities and placed "Japanese culture" in quotes, because it is a vague and popular term without a meaningful and precise definition.
Excellent. I never had a term for this. I used to just call it “riding the wave”. This gives the notion a bit more legitimacy, but also is a starting point to research more on the topic.
Appreciated the David Abram callout. His work is worth reading if you've explored the space of how our lives emerge from our environments. "Becoming Animal" is an interesting read.
[1] http://www.appropedia.org/images/d/d3/Onestraw.pdf