Anjana Ahuja (“We face a looming rice production crisis”, Opinion, April 9) highlights the importance of rice — staple food for over half the world’s population — the threat of climate change to existing output and the need for a 15 to 20 per cent increase in production to meet increasing demand. Climate change is making wet seasons wetter and dry seasons drier. More mouths to feed. A world crisis.
Help is at hand from a book written by Masanobu Fukuoka in 1978 — The One-Straw Revolution. This Japanese microbiologist, farmer and philosopher decided to become a small-scale rice farmer and spent 25 years not ploughing his 1.5 acres, not using artificial chemicals (not even artificial fertilisers), not weeding, and simply letting nature do much of the work of producing rice.
The results were that his output was similar to that of conventional neighbouring rice farmers but that he had avoided most of the expenditure on diesel, all expenditure on artificial chemicals, and his rice was eagerly sought-after, since it contained all of the trace elements humans need for their health (he died at the age of 95).
Despite the book being 47 years old it should be required reading by all soil scientists, students of agriculture and farmers. The book is inexpensive and still in print.
We may not all live in a subtropical warm, wet country where the growing of rice is the main crop, but by applying the principles described in the book we can use brain rather than brawn to do things differently — and with better results for our health and the climate.
Mike Mason
Naphill, Buckinghamshire, UK
