Alternative agriculture

Excerpt

FOR nearly a century a small group of scientists have criticized conventional agricultural systems in the United States and other developed countries. The two main points of that criticism: conventional agriculture wastes potentially useful organic materials, and artificial fertilizers and pesticides harm the soil and life forms in it. Growing out of these two points is still another criticism: conventional agriculture allows too much soil erosion to occur.

The first of the critics was Franklin Hyde King, chief of the Division of Soil Management in the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the latter 1800s and early 1900s. After his retirement, King toured China, Japan, Korea, and Formosa, recording his observations of agriculture and related industries in his classic book Farmers of Forty Centuries.

King's purpose in the book was to warn U.S. farmers that their wasteful ways would catch up with them. He urged farmers to look carefully at their Oriental counterparts who had farmed the same land for 4,000 years using conservation and recycling methods.

Though King died before he could write his last chapter, a “Message of China and Japan to the World,” one sentence from his introduction offers a clue to his thoughts …