“Natural Farming” – Aggie Journalists, We Must Be Careful With The Terms We Use!

Look at the contrasting images: Which one is correct in claiming what is being practiced is “natural farming”?

Top Image:
This one accompanies the Anonymous WWF-Philippinesstory, “Mindanao Farmers Start Off the Year with Natural Farming Systems Technology” published online December 2019[1]. The World Wide Fund, WWF, is a very credible international source of knowledge on conservation, right? Not this time. Very clearly, you can see the white plastic mulch covering the furrows and bare soil in-between them. Mr or Ms Anonymous, the plastic mulch is not natural. The soil notcovered in-between furrows is notnatural. So much soil bare, notnatural, allowing so much naturalwater wasted because it had evaporated from the unprotected, hot soil surface! That is not conservation; that is not natural. The term “natural” is used here very carelessly. Aggie journalists, wake up!

How come I noticed all that immediately when I saw the photograph? Because I learned my organic farming more then 50 years ago, by reading American authors, starting with gentleman farmer Edward H Faulkner of Ohio, and I have never abandoned that concept of working with Mother Nature – although I do not use the term “natural farming” for the kind of organic farming that I advocate.

Bottom image:
This is from the article “What is natural farming” in Final Straw, with this caption: “After harvest, a natural rice field farmed with no till methods[2].” No till, no cultivation.

Independently, Mauna Kea Tea says[3]:

Natural Farming is to do nothing…

(The) basis of natural farming is to do nothing. When you are doing nothing, that is nature at work. Doing nothing does not necessarily mean that you do no work at all. It is to remove all the human prejudice from farming and leave it to nature. It almost appears Zen meditation to be one with nature. Natural farming involves NO TILL, NO WEEDING, NO PESTICIDE, NO FERTILIZER.

Natural is as Mother Nature does. No cultivation of any sort, no weeding of any kind, no pesticide of any source, and no fertilizer of any concoction – none, none, none, none!

The concept of organic farming that I have borrowed from Mr Faulkner involves a little cultivation at the very start. He called it trash farming, where you rotavate the field very shallowly only to cut to pieces the vegetable matter on the surface, such as crop refuse and weeds, and mix those organic pieces with the soil that has been cut up in small pieces in the exact same operation. What happens is that you get a surface layer of organic matter mixed with the soil, which immediately begins to degrade into organic food for your crops! You do not need to concoct any form of organic fertilizer at all – that layer is your organic fertilizer concocted naturally. That’s my natural farming.

And yes, I have a brother-in-law, Inso Casasus, in my hometown of Asingan, Pangasinan who has been successfully practicing my kind of organic farming in the last 50 years!@517

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[1]https://wwf.org.ph/resource-center/story-archives-2019/mindanao-farmers-graduation/?fbclid=IwAR1WqQC318wzRUCNJvbMn5hXaD6jVqDCuqW4bpnG8KvDFjdPdyjQEa2DAZ0

[2]http://www.finalstraw.org/what-is-natural-farming/

[3]https://maunakeatea.com/what-is-natural-farming/