Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37054 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Customer Reviews

Skills For a Low Tech Future
A wonderful book, despite its having been originally written more than 100 years ago. Fresh and sobering look at what it takes to make a civilized society run on a daily basis without modern technology, from food production to how to make cotton mattresses by hand, to manufacturing coal based blocks for home heating and cooking - in a backyard; and how to build a k'ang, a raised heated platform used for sitting and sleeping.
'Farmers' also gives an idea of the human cost and effort needed to keep land fertile and productive, conserve scarce resources, and the ingenuity required daily to have a reasonably comfortable, sustainable lifestyle over many hundreds of generations - a workable world one can confidently pass on to one's descendents, something we DON'T have, for all our vaunted "quality of life" in the US.

Looking at How Others Have Kept Their Soil Healthy Through the Millenium
This book was referred to reverently by the author of "The Wheel of Health", a book about the Hunza people who are famed for their health and longevity, so naturally I had to read the farming book. It describes in a fair amount of detail the several thousand year-old practices of several Asian cultures for successfully maintaining the health of their soil. While these practices are culture-wide, a single farmer could do much of it on his own farm or multiple farms as a community practice in order to pool composting resources. What's odd is that those countries in "Farmers of Forty Centuries" have been able to feed large numbers of people using the methods outlined in this book, yet they have recently been turning away from those tried and true methods in favor of European and American farming methods, both of whose methods have impoverished their soils. There must have been a great sales pitch, pressure from supposedly knowing university studies along with inward cultural pressures to become "modern". They don't realize what an amazing feat they've been accomplishing in keeping their soils healthy for so long.

Along with this book I would highly recommend all of Masanobu Fukuoka's books on farming (if you can find them), especially "Natural Farming", which outlines his methods. "The Wheel of health: The Sources of Long Life and health Among the Hunza" is valuable for their farming and life practices that make them so long-lived and healthy right up to the end with both personal and national applications. For a fresh and humorous approach to night soil composting, check out "The Humanure Handbook: A Guide To Composting Human Manure", which outlines how to use human waste to recharge the soil rather than wasting it in cess tanks and polluting our ground water with it. Although this would only work for warm climates year-round, it certainly follows the spirit of Farmers of Forty Centuries and would be do-able in the warm months in colder climates. (Maybe worth a university study to observe pathogen behavior?)

A Pre-Industrial Agronomy Well Described
This book is one of the influences on Bill Mollison, of Permaculture fame.

It is the record of a fact-finding mission, and describes how East Asia fed itself sustainably for "forty centuries". The original idea was to take home lessons for American farmers, but the agronomy King describes is highly intensive and uses huge inputs of human labour.

As custodian of a bit of rural land, with an abiding interest in sustainable agronomies, I found it a good and interesting read.

The principal take-home lesson for me is that land can be managed for human sustenance, on very long time-scales, without large inputs of external resources, and without the steady degradation suffered by other landscapes.

That's a lesson worth learning, even if we can't apply the detail of the traditional East Asian methods in other times and places.