It is often true that doing organically and without modern aids requires more thought than whipping out the motorized tools and chemicals. At first glance it can seem more "complicated" than the modern method.
I too have had issue with F-san's decrying science, but we need to consider his milieu. He came from the time when science automatically looked for a new chemical or another mechanized process to cut the corners, thus eliminating not just the toil of hand tools and natural inputs, but the jobs and people that went along with it.
Lately I have been spending a great deal of time reading Wendell Berry (This IS more topical than first glance may take in; Larry and I had a phone conversation about when he was first trying to get the American version of OSR printed to no avail, and Wendell took the ball and ran with it, getting his publishers to do so). Wendell is both a farmer and a gardener, and a pretty straight forward guy. He has not given chem ferts the complete heave ho, but sees them as additional expense most farmers can do without.
In his 2004 treatise,
From The Roots Up, Wendell makes the argument for the new science, talking about The Land Institute.
In it's adoption of the healthy ecosystem as the appropriate standard of agricultural performance, the Land Institute has rejected competition as the fundamental principle of economics, and therefore the applied sciences, and has replaced it with the principle of harmony.
This is that place where "new" science begins to diverge from the old. But it is not so new; it is "new" only in our views of what has become Acceptable Practice in the eyes of Man. It is indeed older than time.
And so in espousing the principle and the goal of harmony, The Land Institute aquired an old and honorable ancestry. It aquired at the same time, and in the same way, a working principle also old and honorable: that of art as imitation of Nature. The initiating question was this: if, so to speak, you place a Kansas wheatfield beside a surviving patch of the native Kansas prairie, what is the difference?
This is F-san's question, when we kill the leafhopper, we kill his enemies, we eliminate the frogs and toads and all the other cogs in this machine we do not begin to understand. We damage the machine we cannnot build ourselves, yet desperately need for our continuance.Wendell continues...
Well, the primary difference, obvious to any observer, is that whereas the wheatfield is a monoculture of annuals, the plant community of the prairie is highly diverse and perennial. There are many implications in that difference, not all of which are agricultural, but five of which are of immediate and urgent agricultural interest. The prairie's loss of soil to erosion is minimal, it is highly efficient in it's ability to absorb, store and use water, it makes maximum use of every year's sunlight, it builds and preserves its own fertility, and it protects itself against pest and disease.
Now I don't know about the rest of you, but it is important to me that my garden function with those same five things in mind. I wish to build my soil, while tilling depletes it, and I will not work against my own ends. My water falls from the sky mostly, and I pay for the rest, so I want to maximize its full potential. I do not wish to pay for the energy of fertilizer when the power of the sun provides it already (not to mention the power of chemical fertilizer comes with a petrochemical pricetag, and a hefty carbon footprint). And as I will eat the produce, and want a healthy, nutrient maximized crop, I wish my garden to protect itself as much as possible without my interference. And my pets frequent my gardens as well, and I do not wish them (or any other critter that ain't eating my eats) harm.
We have created and illusion of science as beneficial; this knee jerk response of instant gratification, of dead bugs and foiled fungus, has lulled us into a stupor of ignorance. We do not recognize all the problems we create in our follies, issues needing new solutions which we continue to address by travelling further down the road to ruin. We garden in the fashion of the old woman who swallowed a fly...
And she's dead, of course!
F-san does not ask for complicated, he asks for the complex simplicity that is nature. Think of it as a Hippocratic oath for the garden; "First, do no harm." Study your garden habits in depth, and with a discriminating eye, and you will find the righteous path instinctively. As you said in another thread, gershon, "I am part of Nature." We are indeed, and all Fukuoka-sensei asks is that we start acting like it...
HG
). F-san talks about non-discriminating thought and I think of my conversation with Dr. Ingham on the true benefits of compost. "It's not a particular organism that makes compost work, it is the fact that it is many organisms that makes it work." And she didn't care which ones, as long as it was behaving like compost. Non-discriminating thinking in my mind, masquerading as scientific thought...