Farmers of Forty Centuries Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan

King, F. H. (Franklin Hiram), 1848-1911Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.2
Word count
535K words
Chapters
54

Tags

English Originals History and CultureAgriculture Forestry Livestock East Asian AgricultureSustainable FarmingSoil CareNature ObservationEcological WisdomAgricultural SurveyPractical GuideTraditional AgricultureEclectic ReadingCivilization Comparison

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and JapanAuthor: King, F. H. (Franklin Hiram), 1848-1911,Language: English, Class: S: Agriculture, Release Date: Mar 1, 2004

Editor's review

This book is American agronomist Franklin Hiram King's record of his survey of traditional East Asian agriculture, focusing on farming methods sustained for thousands of years in China, Korea, and Japan. Its core value lies in systematically describing, from an observer's perspective, practices such as crop rotation, fertilization, water management, and intensive land use, providing an early English-language document for understanding East Asia's tradition of agricultural sustainability. Its records of manure recycling, multi-cropping, and intensive cultivation are often cited by later readers discussing ecological and permanent agriculture. As a Project Gutenberg public-domain ebook, the text is easy to search and suitable as supplementary reading for courses in agricultural and environmental history. Readers should note the author's early twentieth-century observational standpoint; his praise of traditional agriculture reflects a particular historical context and should be compared with subsequent research rather than equated directly with present-day agricultural reality.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read by country chapters: start with the China section, then compare with the Korea and Japan chapters to contrast farming differences.
  2. While reading, note the fertilizer recycling and crop rotation practices mentioned, and compare them with contemporary ecological agriculture discussions.
  3. Read together with introductory materials on East Asian agricultural or environmental history to supplement the historical background.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54

FAQ

What does the title "Farmers of Forty Centuries" mean? The title refers to the agriculture of China, Korea, and Japan that the author surveyed, which by his observation had continued for thousands of years without soil depletion. It is not a precise count of years but emphasizes the continuity of East Asian traditional agriculture in maintaining soil fertility, contrasting with the soil exhaustion problems facing Western agriculture at the time.
What does the book mainly record? Based on field surveys, the author records how East Asian farmers maintained land productivity through applying organic fertilizer, crop rotation, multiple cropping, and collecting urban and rural waste for return to the fields, and describes specific practices of irrigation, cultivation, and crop combinations; the core is exploring how agriculture could be sustained long term.
What readers is this book suitable for? It suits readers interested in agricultural history, sustainable agriculture, ecological agriculture, and East Asian rural society, as well as practitioners and researchers concerned with soil fertility and organic farming traditions. Those only wanting to learn modern agricultural techniques may find the content too historically oriented.
What should be noted when reading? The book was written in the early twentieth century, and its survey scope and data were limited by conditions at the time, with some observations carrying the perspective of the era. It is best read as a historical document, focusing on its records of traditional farming methods and discerning them in light of contemporary agronomic knowledge, rather than treating it directly as an operation manual.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

King, F. H. (Franklin Hiram), 1848-1911 Author · American · 1848–1911

F. H. King (Franklin Hiram King, 1848–1911) was an American agricultural scientist known for his research in soil physics, a field in which he was one of the pioneers. He took a lasting interest in the sustainability of agriculture. His representative work, Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, examines farming traditions in East Asia that endured for thousands of years, recording the concrete practices by which local farmers maintained soil fertility and recycled resources. Its style rests on field observation and plain description rather than abstract argument. The book has influenced Western thinking on agriculture and ecology and is often cited by later scholars concerned with sustainable farming. Details of his life, such as his education and posts, are limited in publicly available sources and are not speculated upon here. One of his works is currently held in this collection.