Farmers of Forty Centuries

A No-Till "bed and tread" Community Garden in Rural Arkansas.
 
Community gardeners at First Christian Church Berryville in Berryville, Arkansas, have adapted a centuries old method of no-till production for their organic garden. For more than 40,000 years, Asian farmers worked the same fields repeatedly without sapping the land's fertility and without applying artificial fertilizer! How they accomplished this miraculous feat is described by author Franklin Hiram King, a former official of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, in his book, Farmers of Forty Centuries.
 
King traveled to Asia in the early 1900s to learn how farmers in China, Korea, and Japan were able to achieve successful harvests century after century without exhausting the soil, one of their most valuable natural resources. This book is the result of his extraordinary mission. A fascinating study of waste-free methods of cultivation, Farmers of Forty Centuries reveals the secrets of ancient farming methods and at the same time, chronicles the travels and observations of a remarkable man. A well-trained observer who studied the actual conditions of life among agricultural peoples, King provides intriguing glimpses of Japan, China, Manchuria, and Korea; customs of the people; the utilization of waste; methods of irrigation, reforestation, and land reclamation; the cultivation of rice, silk, and tea; and related topics.
 
Farmers of Forty Centuries is available at Amazon.com and better bookstores everywhere.