book review by Arthur Noll
The Lessons of Forty Centuries of Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
“Farmers of 40 Centuries” is an interesting book. I think the tremendous focus on conservation of nutrients for the land is a very good attitude to have had. However, I feel the pattern of living was not really sustainable, in spite of having gone on so long. It functioned with heavy labor, which was supplied by a growing population, also considered cheap in terms of the monetary market. I have to seriously doubt how happy people were, to be doing such heavy labor, in spite of the reports of how cheerful they were about it. And even with this large amount of labor, the amount of nutrients from the hills in the form of ash and green manure, would run into limits. These limiting factors were acknowledged in the book, and have, I believe, come to pass, with the same result as for western agriculture, with a dependence on fossil fuel, that much of the land there now is dependant on mined minerals, and on chemical plants producing nitrogen compounds. Even at the time, I believe the population was dependent on fossil fuel for the production of iron, a vital commodity for how they lived.
The country had also become highly dependant on a few crops and animals, where before it was so heavily cultivated, I’m sure nature had a much larger variety of plants and animals, and this would be a more stable situation, in terms of disease or weather conditions wiping out one or more of these staple crops. They put a lot of eggs in one basket, doing this. This problem is the same for farming communities around the world.
The effort to control the flooding of the rivers also looks like a precarious venture, with modern efforts being not much better. Building thousands of small dams in upstream locations, (perhaps letting beavers do a lot of the work, are they a native species to Asia?) building houses on stilts in known flood zones, having boats and rafts ready for annual flooding, seem like solutions that would be easier than hundreds of miles of levees and huge dams that can break catastrophically. Varieties of trees that can live through flooding could provide living stilts for housing, and anchor soil and house more firmly than any dead pile could do. More trees would provide shade in a hot country, and provide firewood without so much transportation as was being done at the time. I don’t think that burning straw is a good move, the experience of Masanobu Fukuoka in “One Straw Revolution”, would indicate it is better returned to the soil. It is a poor fuel, in any case, requires someone to constantly tend the fire.
I think patterns of living could be found that were much less labor intensive, and more sustainable over long time periods. Market measures that make abundant people cheap, and abundant resources cheap, will not make moves to such energy efficient and sustainable ways.