"Nature Farming" was established in 1936 by Mokichi Okada, the founder of the Church of World Messianity, an agricultural system originally called "no fertilizer farming" (自然農法, shizen nōhō).[1]
Offshoots such as the Sekai Kyusei Kyo, promoting ‘Kyusei nature farming’, and the Mokichi Okada Association formed after his death to continue promoting the work in Japan and South-East Asia.[2]
ZZ2, a farming conglomerate in South Africa has translated the term to Afrikaans, "Natuurboerdery".[3]
According to the International Nature Farming Research Center in Nagano, Japan,[4] it is based on the theories that:
The term is sometimes used for an alternative farming philosophy of Masanobu Fukuoka.
Main article: Natural Farming |
Another Japanese farmer and philosopher, Masanobu Fukuoka, conceived of an alternative farming system in the 1930s separately from Okada and used the same Japanese characters to describe it.[5] This is generally translated in English as "Natural Farming" although agriculture researcher Hu-lian Xu claims that "nature farming" is the correct literal translation of the Japanese term.[5]