Japan's MOA Natural Farming improves the soil and grows cream-flavored championship rice

Text / Baohua Communication Planning/Execution Chen Yuling

In June 2015, the plane landed at Narita Airport, and the production team began filming the first episode of the Rural Vision series. Led by Mr. Yoshinobu Tsukiashi, a Taiwan, China son-in-law and CEO of the MOA Taiwan Association, we came to a farm on the hillside of Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, and began a 15-day journey of exploring MOA Natural Farming.

MOA is the abbreviation of the name of founder Mr. Mokichi Okada. From a series of blows and hardships in his personal life experience, he pondered how people could attain physical and mental peace. Later, he gained great inspiration from his experience of coming into contact with nature, and then founded the MOA organization with the three major fields of agriculture, art culture, and integrative medicine as its purpose.

For the first six days of filming, we all stayed at Dainin Farm, a 100-hectare experimental farm. In order to practice Mr. Okada's ideals during his lifetime, MOA transformed this land, originally a tea plantation under conventional farming, through land preparation, tilling, and improving the soil with compost. Until now, Dainin Farm has become a demonstration area for natural farming that uses no pesticides, no chemical fertilizers, and even no compost. Mr. Abe, who has worked here for nearly 30 years, explained to us the two most important core concepts of natural farming: "activating the soil" and "planting according to the land."

In a program of only one hour, we could not visit every farmer one by one, nor could we explain every experiment one by one. But in each of the above examples, we can read that what natural farming is trying to explain to the world is not any fixed, rigid practice, but a process in which humans and nature constantly seek balance through long-term interaction, an attitude that requires calming the mind again and listening to nature.

And although we started filming the first episode in 2015 and it is only now being broadcast, some people may feel the wait has been too long, but compared with MOA Natural Farming's insistence on a long-term plan of listening to the land, more than three years of waiting may not count for much.

The documentary series Rural Vision airs every Tuesday at 10 p.m. on PTS Main Channel, and "Japan MOA - Natural Farming" had its global premiere on Christmas Day, December 25, 2018.

Rural Vision official Facebook page: https://goo.gl/EidHU3
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