Fukuoka's Revelation

From here

All striving was without purpose, he saw, all intellectual understanding a chimera. In his 1978 classic on natural farming, The One-Straw Revolution, he wrote: “I could see that all the concepts to which I had been clinging, the very notion of existence itself, were empty fabrications. My spirit became light and clear. I was dancing wildly for joy.”

He immediately quit his job, and soon returned to the family farm where his father set him to work looking after the mandarin orchard. The essence of Masanobu’s insight was the emptiness of human knowledge and effort. Thus, as he applied himself to the task of tending the fruit trees, he questioned every aspect of conventional agricultural practice. His approach was not to ask himself what more he could do to improve the yield of his trees, but rather what practices he could dispense with. Nature, he believed, was a complete and unified whole, with all the resources it needed to thrive on its own without the intervention of human “cleverness.”