Japanese Natural Farming Guru Kawaguchi Yoshikazu

Finding land, working a small plot or anything else countryside related
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Wendy
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Japanese Natural Farming Guru Kawaguchi Yoshikazu

Post by Wendy »

Interesting article....and I wonder who is farming organically/no-till in JSL? Would love to visit some farms. Which would have probably made more sense while things were growing, but then was the season of busy-busy, and now is the season of planning.

https://www.nippon.com/en/people/e00120 ... JbyorHastM

Shizuman
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Re: Japanese Natural Farming Guru Kawaguchi Yoshikazu

Post by Shizuman »

Very interesting article, im starting out doing low tillage and using organic principles, but i wont be getting certified i think. I like the ideas here in the article but with the work load as it is i think a few modern implements are quite useful to be honest. I may be wrong though he has many many more years of experience than i do thats for sure

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Zasso Nouka
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Re: Japanese Natural Farming Guru Kawaguchi Yoshikazu

Post by Zasso Nouka »

Sounds like an interesting project to attempt on a home garden plot. Having said that his approach seems to have a lot of flexibility and willingness to adapt to a given situation rather than enforcing strict rules but I'm not sure his unwillingness to do weeding would work in every situation. but surely some of his techniques could be adapted to a market garden type situation.

korekaranoka

Re: Japanese Natural Farming Guru Kawaguchi Yoshikazu

Post by korekaranoka »

Hi guys! Been a fan of Kawaguchi for a while now: he's one of the few practitioners of shizen-no who actually is faithful to the four tenets of natural farming (no till, no pesticides, no weeding, no fertilisers. A lot of the others usually cop out at some point and use a tractor or something similar. I haven't met him or made it to his farm in Nara, but I have met another of favourite guys in the shizen-no world, Takeuchi Atsunori (竹内考功) based in the Azumino area in Nagano. He has written almost as many books as Kawaguchi but has the added advantage of being much younger (he's about 40). Anyway, if you're interested in getting into natural farming and like the idea of homesteading, then you might want to check out his book 自給自足の自然菜園12ヶ月.

Anyway, I practice organic farming and use an almost entirely no-tillage approach (I use a kanriki to break up the soil before I build my permanent beds, and I use a broadfork which I don't actually consider to be tillage, but it isn't entirely removed from it either...).

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