J. I. Rodale and Mokichi Okada: When Organic Farming Met Natural Farming (1951)

Illustrated portraits of J. I. Rodale holding a handful of compost and Mokichi Okada reading an airmail letter

kaebou

At the natural farming farm where I used to work, we first built up the soil with bark compost, and then with cow manure compost. But disease and insect damage kept getting worse, so we switched to compost made from grass. The grass came from riverbanks, cut by the city, and this time trash came with it and ended up in our fields. We stopped that too. In the end, we used only a little grass from the farm itself and added almost nothing to the soil.

We began with compost at the center and moved, step by step, toward what Okada taught: adding almost nothing. The road our farm took is the very difference between the two men in this article.

“Healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people.” For many people, that phrase sums up organic farming. It is closely tied to one American: J. I. Rodale, the man who helped popularize the word “organic.”

In 1951, a letter from Rodale reached a Japanese farming pioneer on the other side of the Pacific. His name was Mokichi Okada.

Who Was J. I. Rodale?

J. I. Rodale was born in New York City in 1898. In 1930, he started a publishing company, Rodale Press.

In 1940, he and his wife, Anna, bought a run-down farm in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and began experimenting with organic farming. Two years later, his company launched a magazine called Organic Farming and Gardening.

Rodale believed that healthy soil needed compost, and he rejected pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. In 1947, he founded the Soil and Health Foundation, known today as the Rodale Institute. He died in 1971.

A Letter to Japan

In a talk in September 1951, Okada mentioned a reply that had arrived from Rodale just a few days earlier. According to Okada, Rodale wrote that he was very glad someone in Japan shared his ideas, and that he hoped they could work together.

Okada called it a reply full of hope. He said he expected this revolution in farming to spread around the world.

At the time, Japan was struggling to feed itself. Citing government figures, Okada said the country was harvesting about 64 million koku of rice a year — roughly 9.6 million tons — and still had to buy about 20 million koku, roughly 3 million tons, from abroad. He was convinced that five years of natural farming would raise harvests by half. He also planned to gather the theory and farmers’ reports into a book and send it free to farm organizations across Japan.

What They Shared

Both men believed that chemical fertilizers were harming the soil — and, through the soil, the food grown in it.

In 1952, Okada wrote about a finding he credited to Rodale. Livestock raised on grass grown with chemical fertilizer were less healthy and gave poorer milk. Livestock raised on grass grown with compost alone were very healthy and gave excellent milk. Okada added that he had been warning about chemical fertilizers for some twenty years.

Where They Differed

The difference was compost.

For Rodale, compost was the heart of healthy soil. Okada came to see it differently.

In 1951, Okada’s own method still allowed compost. He later explained that this was partly because farming with no fertilizer at all had run into official rules during the postwar occupation. But by 1953, he was saying that, in truth, it is best to add nothing at all, not even compost. Compost should be used only where the soil tends to harden or dry out, he said, and only once it has rotted down until it is almost like soil.

Both men were fighting the same thing. But while Rodale worked to feed the soil, Okada wanted to bring out the soil’s own strength.

The Fukuoka Connection

The story has one more twist. In 1978, Rodale Press — the company J. I. Rodale founded — published the English edition of Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution. Rodale himself had died seven years earlier.

So the company behind Organic Farming and Gardening also brought Japan’s other great natural farming pioneer to English readers.

Who Was Mokichi Okada?

Mokichi Okada (1882–1955) is known today for a farming method that uses no fertilizer at all, and for a large body of writing on health, art, and how people ought to live. He began growing crops without fertilizer in the mid-1930s.