Sowing Seeds in the Desert

"This book is not a breath of fresh air, it's a howling gale from the East. It challenges us to think outside our normal, rational frames and venture into a whole new way of relating to spirituality, the earth, and the growing of food. As I read, I was tempted to pick holes in Fukuoka's prescriptions for greening the world's deserts, but I kept coming back to the inescapable fact that he farmed his own land according to these principles over many years and produced a lot of food."

—Patrick Whitefield, author of The Earth Care Manual

The last major work from the author of international bestseller The One-Straw Revolution

The earth is in great peril due to the corporatization of agriculture, the rising climate crisis, and the ever-increasing levels of global poverty, starvation, and desertification on a massive scale. This present condition is not “natural,” according to farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka, but a result of humanity’s destructive actions. Our global trauma, however, can be remedied—and maybe even reversed—but only when we change our methods of earth stewardship, and the very way we think about the relationship between humans and nature.

Fukuoka’s inspiring and international best-selling book, The One-Straw Revolution (1978), spoke directly to the growing movement of organic farmers and activists seeking a new way of life. For years after its publication, Fukuoka traveled the world spreading his teachings and developing a devoted following of farmers seeking to return to the truth of nature.

Sowing Seeds in the Desert, a summation of those years of travel and research, is Fukuoka’s last major work—and perhaps his most important. Fukuoka spent years working with people and organizations in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States, to show how you could grow food and regenerate forests with very little irrigation in the most desolate places. This revolutionary book presents Fukuoka’s plan to rehabilitate the world’s deserts and achieve global food security by using natural farming, including practical solutions for feeding a growing human population and providing a deep and renewed understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature. Fukuoka’s message comes at a time when people around the world seem to have lost their frame of reference, and offers us a way forward.

About the Author

Masanobu Fukuoka

Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008) was a farmer and philosopher who was born and raised on the Japanese island of Shikoku. He studied plant pathology and spent several years working as a customs inspector in Yokohama. While working there, at the age of 25, he had an inspiration that changed his life. He decided to quit his job, return to his home village, and put his ideas into practice by applying them to agriculture.

Over the next sixty-five years he worked to develop a system of natural farming that demonstrated the insight he was given as ...

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