Every year, farmers spray more pesticides. And every year, the pests come back stronger.
Sound familiar? A Japanese thinker named Mokichi Okada was writing about exactly this problem in 1951 — and his explanation might surprise you.
It Starts With the Soil
Okada’s argument was simple: pests don’t appear randomly. They appear where the soil is dirty.
When farmers add fertilizer, he wrote, the soil becomes polluted. Polluted soil decays. And wherever there is decay, insects and bacteria follow. It’s a basic law of nature — the same reason you find maggots in a compost pit.
Different fertilizers, he observed, produce different kinds of pests. And as new chemical fertilizers appeared, new pest species appeared alongside them.
The Trap of Pesticides
Here’s where it gets worse.
To fight the pests, farmers spray pesticides. But pesticides are powerful poisons. When they sink into the soil, they damage it further. Weakened soil grows weaker crops. Weaker crops attract more pests.
So farmers spray more pesticides. The soil weakens more. More pests arrive.
Okada called it a vicious cycle with no exit.
It Gets Into Your Body Too
Okada didn’t stop at the farm. He followed the problem all the way to the dinner table.
Chemical fertilizers, he wrote, are absorbed by crops. Those crops become your food. Eaten three times a day, every day, even small amounts of chemical residue accumulate in the body — and gradually contaminate the blood.
His conclusion was striking: dirty blood is the reason infectious diseases spread. People with clean blood, he argued, can resist bacteria. People with contaminated blood cannot.
This, he believed, explained why some people get sick during an outbreak and others don’t — a question that medicine had not yet answered.
The Solution: Stop Polluting the Soil
Okada’s answer was not a better pesticide. It was no pesticide at all — and no chemical fertilizer either.
Clean soil, he argued, produces strong crops. Strong crops resist pests naturally. And people who eat clean food maintain clean blood — and healthier lives.
This was the foundation of what he called Shizen Nōhō — Natural Farming.
Who Was Mokichi Okada?
Mokichi Okada (1882–1955) was a Japanese thinker and spiritual teacher who believed that human health and the health of the earth were deeply connected. Natural Farming was one expression of that belief — a practice he developed and tested for over a decade before sharing it publicly.
Read the Original
This is a short introduction. The full text — written by Okada in Japanese in 1951 — is available on meshiya.jp.