Cultivated land is the spatial carrier of agricultural production activities, and cultivation is the main symbol and important foundation of the evolution of human civilization. At a time when agriculture is trapped by oil and domesticated by industry, and in today's deteriorating agricultural ecological environment, it is very important and urgent to realize the sustainable development of agricultural production and ensure that Chinese firmly hold China's rice bowl. Franklin A. Brown, the father of soil physics in the United States, Based on his detailed investigation of agricultural farming in East Asia, and a comparative study of rural production patterns in China, Japan, and the United States at the same latitude, Professor H. King wrote "Four Thousand Years of Farmers: Permaculture in China, Korea, and Japan", which is a work of exploration and revelation that "is eager to understand how farmers produce enough food with limited soil in the three densely populated East Asian countries", and is also a classic work that traces and pays tribute to the ecological agricultural civilization of East Asia.
One
Franklin S. Dr. H. King is a professor of agricultural physics at the University of Wisconsin, USA, and once served as the director of the Soil Bureau of the United States Department of Agriculture, and has published world-renowned agricultural works such as "Land", "Irrigation and Drainage" and "Agricultural Physics", and enjoys a high academic reputation in the world agronomy community in the early 20th century. In order to "understand how it is possible today, after 2,000 or 3,000 or maybe 4,000 years, to produce enough food from the soil to feed the dense populations of these three countries," Professor Kim traveled to China, Japan, and Korea for four months and 20 days on agricultural expeditions. As soon as the book was published in the United States, it caused a shock and uproar in the agricultural circles in Europe and the United States, and "even became the bible of the organic agriculture movement in the United States in the 50s of the 20th century." ”
Farming is the prelude and prelude to the succession and change of human civilization, and the farming culture is complex and vast in China and even in East Asia, but so far, neither historians, sociologists nor agronomists have completely and accurately identified and refined the basic mode and main experience of agricultural cultivation in East Asia. In the preface to his book "Four Thousand Years of Farmers", Professor Kim says that we have long longed to meet Chinese and Japanese farmers, to walk into their fields with our own feet, and to see with our own eyes the methods, tools, and habits of the world's oldest farmers. Professor Jin is an expert with a clear sense of the problem, and at the beginning of the book, he puts forward the question that runs through the book: "How did East Asia, which has the largest population in the world, feed this huge population with limited land in the long years of two or three thousand years, and how did such an incredible civilization maintain its land resources from being exhausted". After on-the-spot consultation and his own thinking, he believes that the primary condition of farming is to maintain the fertility of the soil, and the Han people in the Far East have long encountered such problems and have found a way to solve such problems, which is the first lesson for the West to learn from the East to protect natural resources and the ecological environment.
In the book, Professor Jin uses a large number of examples and many data to compare and analyze the farming methods of the East and the West, and believes that the United States has exhausted the soil fertility in less than 100 years, while Chinese agriculture has undergone more than 4,000 years of evolution, and the soil is still as fertile as ever, and feeds several times the population of the United States, the fundamental reason is that Oriental agriculture is the world's best ecological farming, Professor Jin has heard and witnessed the practical operation of the sustainable farming model in East Asia, and witnessed the historical secret of maintaining the vitality of East Asian soil for 4,000 years." Amazed at the high productivity of their land, and amazed at the fact that these peasants provided such efficient labor while being willing to accept very little remuneration", the author also predicted with joy and excitement: "If the world can be fully and accurately explained why such a large number of people can be fed by relying solely on the agricultural products of China, Korea and Japan, then agriculture will deservedly become the most developmental, educational, and socially significant industry." ”
Reading this book can make people think deeply about the relationship between the land and the peasant, in the traditional farming mechanism of East Asia, the peasant is the key element and core of agricultural development, the peasant is deeply dependent on the land, and the agricultural development forms a closed cycle with the help of the peasant, while the modern agriculture in the West is the use of machines, fertilizers, Pesticides have replaced the dominant position of farmers, farmers have been stripped out of agricultural production activities, and the balance of the normal cycle of agriculture has been broken. Professor Kim is not only an accomplished master of soil science, but also a pure environmentalist and a resolute ecologist. In "Four Thousand Years of Farmers", he clearly pointed out the various diseases and many shortcomings of modern agriculture in the West, and observed and predicted that only by drawing valuable experience from the ecological agricultural civilization of the East can the "sustainable development" of Western agriculture be maintained. Professor Jin's concept of ecological agriculture not only expands and enriches the pedigree of agricultural science in modern Europe and the United States, but also extracts agricultural production concepts such as "sustainability" and "sustainability" from the oriental farming model.
Two
"Four Thousand Years of Peasants" is not only an agricultural monograph based on field investigations, but also a travelogue of agricultural investigation based on narrative. In the book, Professor Jin elaborated on some cases and many values on the scale, cost, output and profit of agricultural production in East Asia, and reviewed and restored the production scene and life picture of East Asian farmers in the early 20th century, so as to explain that intensive farming is the main feature and basic mode of agriculture in East Asia. We know that Chinese farmers have invented and followed the production and operation mode of "intensive cultivation + planting and breeding" for thousands of years: on the one hand, farmers intensively invest labor, seeds, organic fertilizers and other production factors on effective land, continuously improve the output per unit area, and use all available land resources. On the other hand, Oriental farmers raised pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens and other livestock and poultry to develop their household sideline business, especially in some densely populated areas in the south, people took silkworm raising, spinning and weaving, tea planting and other handicrafts as an important supplement to the cultivation industry.
"Four Thousand Years of Farmers" mentions that crops are "put to good use", which can be reasonably explained from the deep processing and comprehensive utilization of rice - rice is not only the main food crop in southern China, but also a necessary building material for building houses and sheds; it can not only be used to make straw mats, straw bags and other daily necessities, but also can be woven into ornaments for sale; in addition, farmers also spread rice straw in rice fields, which can not only prevent soil erosion, but also play a role in heat preservation, The role of manure; paddy fields can also be used to raise ducks and fish, to achieve the superposition of planting and breeding, a field for dual use, because of this, the production mode of rice farming in southern China is circular and sustainable, reaching the peak of the world's ancient agricultural agronomy, this kind of agriculture - fishery (poultry) - The agricultural ecosystem closely integrated with agriculture is a major creation of land use by farmers in the water towns south of the Yangtze River in China, and it is also the beginning of the establishment of rational artificial ecological agriculture on the mainland.
Through close observation and in-depth thinking, Professor Jin discovered the secret of China's continuous and endless ecological agriculture, that is, Chinese farmers follow the philosophical idea of "the unity of nature and man", and uphold the systematic ecological concept of harmony and integration of man and earth, as Mr. Fei Xiaotong said in his commentary on "Four Thousand Years of Farmers": "He (Professor Jin) describes Chinese culture from the basis of land, and he believes that Chinese is like a link in the entire ecological balance, and this cycle is the cycle of man and soil." It was under the inspiration and influence of "Four Thousand Years of Peasants" that Fei Xiaotong came to the famous conclusion that traditional Chinese society is a rural society.
Organic agriculture is an important concept invented by Professor Jin in his book "Four Thousand Years of Farmers", and it is also a major contribution of this epoch-making book to the development of agriculture in the contemporary world. According to Professor Jin's explanation, organic agriculture refers to the planting industry that uses organic fertilizer to meet the growth needs of crops, or the breeding industry that uses organic feed to meet the growth needs of livestock and poultry in the production of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, growth regulators and livestock and poultry feed additives. As far as practical operation is concerned, modern organic agriculture is from Europe and the United States and other western developed countries, organic agriculture has gone through the tortuous and bumpy road of industrialization, the reason is that the western developed countries have both concern and hope for natural organic food, but also in the capital logic driven by the infinite pursuit of "oil agriculture". However, organic agriculture, which Westerners once talked about, borrowed precisely from the wisdom and inventions of the ancient Chinese, which even many scholars in China know very little.
As early as the beginning of the last century, Professor Jin wrote in "Four Thousand Years of Farmers": "The secret of the longevity of traditional Chinese agriculture lies in the diligence, wisdom and thrift of Chinese farmers, in the use of time and space to improve the utilization rate of land, and in the cultivation of soil fertility by returning human and animal manure and all waste and pond mud to the field." Judging from the current situation, since the 90s of the 20th century, global organic agriculture has entered a golden stage of rapid development, and has become a worldwide economic movement, and some international organizations and developed countries have promulgated relevant laws and systems to protect and promote the development and prosperity of organic agriculture. History sometimes seems comical, occasionally playing tricks and teasing the Chinese people. Throwing away the advanced farming concept and excellent farming tradition of China, after the reform and opening up, had to take Europe and the United States as a teacher, follow in the footsteps of the West, in April 2005 issued a national standard for organic agricultural products, and at the time of the release of this standard, many experts and scholars engaged in organic agriculture research and some organic product evaluation organizations, The certification body still believes that organic agriculture originated in the West, and regards the West as the source and base camp of organic agriculture, but it is not known that the original concept of organic agriculture is deeply rooted in traditional Chinese farming, and China is the real ideological source and spiritual matrix of organic agriculture, which has been explained and fully explained in "Four Thousand Years of Farmers".
Three
Regarding the production mode and natural state of organic agriculture, Professor Jin wrote in "Four Thousand Years of Farmers" The Chinese book talks about the fertilizer applied by the ancient farmers to the land, which is completely livestock and poultry manure and human excrement, which is put into the farmland after fermentation and drying, so that the soil fertility of the farmland can be increased, and the development and utilization of these manures, the author writes in the book: " At that time, the sewers in China's cities were very narrow, and in the early morning of large and small cities, there were always many suburban farmers driving donkey carts or ox carts into the cities to transport the manure from the sewers to the fields, which not only cultivated the soil for the good growth of crops. And beautify the urban ecological environment, "this may be the most simple and primitive form of organic agriculture." In addition, in different chapters of the book, Professor Jin lists more than 20 kinds of organic fertilizers such as livestock and poultry manure, grass and tree leaves, and crop straw, which are collected, processed and used by farmers year after year, which not only replenish the crops with phytonutrients, but also improve the physical and chemical properties of the soil and enhance the fertility of the soil. In this sense, Professor Jin is not only the discoverer and pioneer of organic agriculture, but also the founder and pioneer of ecological agriculture and circular agriculture. It is not only an academic work on agricultural production in East Asia, but also a tribute to ecological agriculture in the East by Western agricultural experts, which caused a great sensation in Western academic circles in the middle of the 20th century and became a treasure book and bible guiding the organic agriculture movement in Europe and the United States.
To this day, practitioners of "organic agriculture" and "ecological agriculture" in the West are still looking for inspiration and inspiration in Professor Jin's book on East Asian agriculture a hundred years ago. In modern times, organic agriculture is facing increasingly serious problems in the West and the East, as mentioned above, agricultural industrialization and agricultural petrochemicalization are intensifying, and the food safety problems caused by agricultural pollution are becoming more and more prominent, especially the large-scale and large-dose application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides born in the petrochemical industry, resulting in soil compaction, acidification, salinization, soil health is weakening and degrading, agricultural production is encountering unprecedented challenges, and organic agriculture is difficult to achieve sustainable development. Paradoxically, at a time when American agricultural experts are working tirelessly to carefully sort out and summarize China's ancient organic agricultural production model, and when the theoretical views in "Four Thousand Years of Farmers" are evolving into practical effectiveness in a few Western countries, China, which has entered the modern society, has consciously abandoned the concept of organic agricultural production created by its ancestors, alienated itself from the natural friendship with the land, and began to use industrialization to change or even subvert traditional farming methods: mechanized planting, chemical fertilizer induced production, The increase of pesticides, the production and life of Chinese farmers have been alienated and distorted, and what is more terrible is that a large amount of rainwater will bring the residual pesticides to the rivers and reservoirs and even seep into the ground, which constitutes greater pollution to the drinking water, seriously endangering people's health and life safety, coupled with more and more food, vegetables and poultry eggs poisoned by chemicals, the probability of people getting sick has risen sharply, and this agricultural production mode is completely contrary to the traditional Chinese farming model.
The data show that China is a big polluter at present, but few people know that agriculture is China's most polluting industry, and Chinese people often proudly say that China uses 7% of the world's arable land and 6.4% of water resources to feed 22% of the population, but the mainland uses 35% of the world's chemical fertilizers and 40% of pesticides for this, and pays extremely heavy environmental and ecological costs while increasing grain and vegetable production. In view of this, it is now of great practical significance to re-emphasize the organic agriculture proposed in "The Four Thousand Years of Farmers". If "resource conservation and environmental friendliness" in the current context are taken as the main criteria for judging "permanent agriculture" or "sustainable agriculture", then local culture is the highest form of civilization that supports this standard, that is to say, "permanent agriculture" or "sustainable agriculture" is not only a farming method in rural culture, but also a way of life that shapes and solidifies the living conditions of farmers. Interpreting the book "Four Thousand Years of Farming", one will feel that the history of farming in East Asia is like a quiet and simple landscape painting opened in front of the reader, and the ancestors of this magical land have constructed an agricultural philosophy that conforms to the laws of nature and echoes the farming of the four seasons with diligence and wisdom.
Four
Some commentators may think that this is a romanticization of Professor Jin's living conditions of East Asian farmers at that time, but in the historical background of the enduring agricultural civilization, this state of existence is undoubtedly naturally formed, as long as they are close to and kind to the land, whether they are active or passive, they will be closer to the cycle of the four seasons and the alternation of nature. Chemical and psychological reactions, of which time is a function of these reactions, suggest that East Asian farmers are inherently industrious biologists who are always able to arrange their farming activities according to the hours of farming in order to ensure maximum returns and thus contribute to the overall prosperity of China's agrarian economy. As a large agricultural country with a history of more than 4,000 years, China has left a rich and brilliant agricultural cultural heritage to today's people, but under the encroachment of modern industrial civilization, the value and function of agricultural civilization are being ruthlessly deconstructed and cruelly devoured, and the traditional farming model is being wantonly subverted and deliberately destroyed, which forces people to re-examine our past. It is not only an academic work that traces and analyzes East Asian farming, but also a humanistic carrier to spread and spread the excellent farming culture of East Asia.
"Four Thousand Years of Peasants" is a highly readable work with pictures and texts, and the reader will read it from a relaxed perspective and a soothing rhythm, and follow the author's point of view to explore and review it one by one. The book presents the observation, cognition and thinking of a Western agricultural expert on the Eastern agrarian society in 17 chapters, leading the current readers to understand the rural world of China, Korea and Japan a century ago. From Gyeonggi to Changchun in Northeast China, he also introduced the agronomic knowledge directly related to farming production, such as water conservancy facilities and organic agricultural fertilizers, and recorded intensive farming methods such as intercropping and intercropping at a large length, reflecting the author's expectations and appreciation for the farming model in East Asia. Although the permaculture and organic agriculture advocated by Professor Jin have not always been inherited in China due to the severance and dismemberment of the farming model of East Asia due to the industrial civilization, the wisdom and experience contained in the thousands of years of agricultural civilization of the Chinese nation are still worthy of celebration and glory, after all, China is a big agricultural country with a long history, and agricultural wisdom and farming experience are priceless treasures worth cherishing for Chinese farmers and the whole country.
"Four Thousand Years of Farmers" allows Chinese and foreign readers to see the superb wisdom and outstanding contributions of the Chinese nation in agricultural farming, and also allows readers to see the various shortcomings and many foci of agriculture in Europe, America and contemporary China a hundred years ago.
(The author is a distinguished researcher at the Heilongjiang Provincial Research Center for the Theoretical System of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics)