Have you ever read a book and felt that you had found a kindred spirit. This author did it for me. Back in the 1980's, Masanobu Fukuoka was watching his fellow Japanese and the U.S. way of farming remove itself from God, from the essence of nature. He had a lifelong dream of creating and/or restoring nature in desertous places. He practiced what he preached and lived his life in line with his beliefs. He is Christian. He did believe in a lot of the same philosophies as the Buddhist. But, as a Christian, he sure didn't believe God only lived in a church building, and neither do I, for that matter.

He was also a certified agricultural scientist who found science research inconsistent and lacking in truly discovering nature and how it works. Most everything he brought to light in this book is speculative, but he reinforces his thoughts with things he has observed throughout his travels. His life has been centered around living very close to nature, and letting nature guide his work instead of him trying to alter nature to work for him....because, in the end, it can't be done. You destroy nature, you destroy mankind because God is the essence of nature and man! They are one! It’s like turning your back on God when you destroy nature.

Think about this! In the beginning was God. God breathed life into nature (trees, flowers, earth, space, etc...), and God breathed life into man. We are all "a part of God". This must be the reason why I feel so close to God when I’m getting my hands dirty in the garden. In the years that I don’t do any gardening, I feel very disconnected, not only from God, but from life itself!

The author believed man has created the problems we see today in nature by clear cutting, the large amount of meats we consume, the thousands of single-crop acreages now grown to feed animals and run cars (instead of growing a variety of nutrient dense foods to feed the people), to applying chemical fertilizers and pesticides, even rototilling and compacting the soil with heavy farm equipment are all root causes of our erosion and decline in today's agriculture. He believed agricultural practices were actually going backwards. We may be creating more food, but at the expense of nutrition and soil health. Scientists are continuously trying to create the next best chemical fertilizers, pesticides and machinery to harvest those thousands of acres of genetically modified (GMO) crops full of pesticides to stay atop of the ever growing agricultural problems that we have created. The bottom line is our farming soils that the world depends on is completely depleted. Natural farming will be key to bring back the health of our soil, and ultimately the health of nature itself. This book just barely touches on the process of natural farming. I'm hoping to read more about the process in his other book, "The Natural Way of Farming".

I can't believe it, but he actually expressed in written words what I have always questioned about who determined, for example, that the way of Indian worship was wrong and un-Christian. It is very possible that everyone, the Indians, the Jews, the Muslims (not the radicals) Japanese, Buddhist, Monks, and the Christians are actually worshipping the same God, but just in their own "language" per say...in their own culture and manner. We all have our statues resembling what we believe to be our cultural image of God (or Jesus). Japanese have their Buddhas, Indians have their totem poles, Muslims have their rugs, candles and cows as a sacred image, and Americans and English have Jesus and Mary statues. We all look up into the same sky worshipping God. But they may call God something different and describe him differently. Yet, we may all be expressing ourselves to the same entity. Who deemed MY way of worship as the ONLY way to worship God? Man? Well, man is very limited in his visions and many man-made religions also like to put God in a box. ( )