Natural farming & syntropy
Two traditions that begin by taking things away — the plough, the fertiliser, the spray — and let succession do the work a machine would otherwise be sent to do.
Notes
Permaculture designs a system. These two traditions do something subtly different: they remove interventions one at a time and watch what the land does without them.
The method that results looks lazy and is not. Fukuoka’s fields were seeded into standing straw and never ploughed, and they matched the yields of the most productive conventional farms in Japan. Götsch’s plantings in Bahia are pruned hard and often, on the argument that cutting is what tells a system to grow — the input is labour and timing rather than nitrogen.
What the two share is a stance toward succession. Neither treats the plant community as something to be held still. Both plant the whole successional sequence at once and manage which stage is expressing itself.