Persephone Days: Fukuoka Seedballs
No, it’s not what it sounds like — but the concept of doing nothing to do something can be applied to all of life
A few months ago in Persephone Days, I described one of my favorite gardens — a wild jumble of vegetables planted haphazardly on windrows of composted manure on a farm in Oregon. I had never seen nor heard of anything like this; I had essentially no experience growing vegetables at all, never mind this chaos.
“We made it with Fukuoka seedballs,” the other intern on the farm informed me when I inquired. Eli and I were both 19, but while I was there for a free place to pitch my tent after semi-spontaneously moving across the country, he had come to this farm with purpose. I was only vaguely interested in farming. Eli, on the other hand, would go out into the woods and lie on the ground and talk to the mushrooms, and he sincerely believed that “Fukuoka seedballs” was a phrase that would have the slightest bit of meaning to me.
He was appalled to learn that I was unfamiliar with eccentric rice farmer Masanobu Fukuoka and his most famous book, The One-Straw Revolution. That night, at Eli’s insistence, the entire farm household gathered around the TV. We watched some short film clip about the guy on VHS, meant to bring me up to speed, but which mostly it just left me baffled. “Do-Nothing Farming” sounded appealing on the surface, but it was difficult to make a connection between rice growing and tangerine trees and the very intensive mushroom farming in which we spent our days. The jungle garden was nice for salad, but everything else we did involved HEPA filters, pressure cookers, and hygrometers.
As far as I could tell from the video, “Do-Nothing Farming” meant letting things be kind of wild and jungly — not weeding, letting your fruit trees go unpruned. Eli’s seedballs were his interpretation of this: Fukuoka apparently planted his crops by mixing the seeds with dirt and clay so he could broadcast them farther, or so that the soil would help them sprout — or something. By mixing a jumble of vegetable seeds into the balls, Eli explained, planting the whole garden was easy, and everything was distributed more evenly. No plowing, no tilling, no poking seeds into the dirt, no weeding: “Do-Nothing” vegetable gardening.
After leaving the farm not long after that, I mostly forgot about “Fukuoka seedballs” — until they became trendy a few years later in the permaculture community. In that context, the phrase was used to describe a mix, usually of wildflower seeds, blended with clay and meant to be tossed into neglected lands, eventually to grow lush meadows. This plan rarely ended up working well, and harsh words were tossed around. Some claimed Fukuoka was just a hack.
“Do-Nothing” farming was dismissed as too good to be true, or maybe something that worked only once, for one guy, in one context.
I could never quite forget the jungle garden or the evocative One Straw Revolution title, nor was I able, over the years, to ignore his many fans in the permie scene. When I eventually returned to Fukuoka, though, it was for philosophy, not agricultural instruction.
Fukuoka talked about how his goal was trying to find things on his farm that he could NOT do, or stop doing. As he experimented with cutting things away, he found that some things, like tilling or plowing, or even keeping his rice paddies flooded, turned out to be unnecessary.
Stepping out of the garden, I found this idea incredibly inspiring in my early days of parenting. So many of the things I read about infant care seemed like good candidates for “Do-Nothing” parenting — or at least some experimentation. I ditched pureed vegetables and offered my baby chunks of whatever I was eating. I stopped sitting her up before she could get there on her own. There are other names for the things I was trying (Baby-Led Weaning, RIE), but Fukuoka was who was really on my mind. I was experimenting with polycultural gardening as I was letting my infant blossom without trying to force her, and I was catching a glimpse of how freeing this way of thinking could be.
As someone who has always felt compelled to action and struggle and making things happen, it’s more comfortable to think of it as Force-Nothing rather than Do-Nothing: maybe a nuance is lost in translation, or maybe I’m not there yet, but I still see plenty of “doing” in Fukuoka’s work. The more I can let go of the urge to force, though, the more I think it might actually be the only way to get anything done. The more I can stop struggling so hard (against anything — even things that on first reflection seem to require struggling against!), the more life opens up.
Once I took a class on early childhood language and literacy. Our textbook and teacher both admitted that all the current science about how children learn to read best shows that it’s not possible before certain developmental milestones are met, usually around age seven. Before that, they acknowledged, reading instruction was, at best, busy work, at worst, frustrating to the point of causing harm. Yet the next months of class were spent preparing us all to carry out exactly that busy work with four- and five-year-olds. Can some kids learn to read that young? Sure. But does that justify the wasted time and effort and stress?
Forcing-nothing isn’t about throwing seeds into hostile territory in a dry lump of clay and getting mad when they don’t sprout, though. It does take work, and a lot of care. It takes understanding and study. Fukuoka didn’t just toss his rice seeds out into the paddy and cross his fingers (although for many things that will work!), he studied the way the crops grew and when.
He tossed his seedballs — which, it turns out, only contained rice seed — into a plot growing barley at a particular time, allowing the rice to germinate and grow in the barley’s protection for a limited time before the barley was harvested, allowing the rice to spring up. He left straw in the field as mulch, and was able to do all of this without flooding or fertilization mainly due to luck in his site and climate. But he studied all this, he knew about these conditions and used them to his benefit.
He became famous for outyielding neighboring farms with his unorthodox techniques. But like the kids who might miss out on a year or so of struggling through Dick and Jane if reading instruction is delayed, even if Fukuoka’s rice harvest had been somewhat less than his conventionally-farming counterparts, the saved effort might still have been worthwhile.
For me, this isn’t just about efficiency, and if you and your kindergartener like doing phonics activities, rock on. Grow a tidy garden with weeded rows if that pleases you. Ultimately, I’m thinking about Forcing-Nothing on a bigger scale, one that recognizes that we’re part of nature, part of the creative-destructive flow. Destruction and creation, after all, are intimate partners, and everything is change. Species spread around the globe, evolve, go extinct. We are the ones who create categories like “native” and “invasive,” “bad” and “good.”
“We are nature, working,” is a fairly well-known saying in the permaculture world, but that can be really hard to grasp. We’re not “working with nature,” or “studying nature,” or “protecting and preserving nature.” We ARE nature. It’s all nature: Fukuoka’s neighbor’s machinery, the HEPA filters we used to grow mushrooms on the farm. Reading workbooks for preschoolers. Plastic bags. It all sprung from the natural materials of this world and our natural ape brains and hands.
These are the site conditions we have to really accept before we can hope to be effective.
We can’t just throw up our hands and never bother growing food or learning to read or working for a better world, of course. Managing parts of the flow of nature that we find ourselves caught up in is one of the special things humans are really good at, but we’ve got to be humble about our place in the whole thing. The times I find myself struggling the hardest are those times I have the most rigid expectations for how things are going to turn out. Forcing-nothing means also being open to a complete change in outcome.
This is why I keep loving permaculture, even though I know now that it’s not about seedballs or food forests or polycultural vegetable gardens or herb spirals or any of the other things people want to do in isolation and slap the label on it.
Permaculture ought to be about taking a step back from our hurry to right perceived wrongs, and shedding our moral judgments on the course of things. It should be about humbling ourselves in the face of the mind-boggling strangeness and staggering complexity we find if we really observe the living systems of this earth. And then, when we identify the parts we want to change or manage (as we do, being human), permaculture’s tools can help us in finding the ways and places we can do so as effortlessly as possible.