INTRODUCTION
Kyusei Nature Farming was developed in Japan with the objective of
producing food that is safe and free of harmful chemicals and
toxic materials. For many years the practitioners of Kyusei Nature
Farming adopted the organic farming system, with little results to
provide adequate food for the majority of the population.
In the 1980's, Prof. Dr. Teruo Higa introduced the concept of Effective
Micro organisms (EM) to Kyusei Nature Farming. Thus, a
group of beneficial micro organisms were cultured and used as a
means of improving soil conditions, suppressing disease inducing
microbes and improving the efficiency of organic matter
utilisation by crops. This technology proved to be highly
successful, and thus an international conference was organised in
November 1989 in Thailand to introduce this technology to the Asia
Pacific region. At this conference, the Asia Pacific Natural
Agriculture Network (APNAN) was formed.
The primary aim of APNAN is to establish an international network
of scientists in the Asia Pacific region, in order to promote
research, education practices and technologies.
These activities will be based on the principles of Kyusei Nature
Farming and the technology of Effective Micro organisms (EM)
IDEAL AGRICULTURE
The main theme of Kyusei Nature Farming is to practice an IDEAL
AGRICULTURE. The five principles of ideal agriculture as advocated
by Kyusei Nature Farming are:
TAKE OF THE EARTH ONLY WHAT YOU CAN RETURN AGAIN!
1. It produces safe and nutritious food to enhance human health.
2. It is economically and spiritually beneficial to both producers
(farmers) and consumers.
3. It is sustainable and easily practised by everyone.
4. It conserves our environment.
5. It produces sufficient food of high quality for an expanding
world population.
USE OF BENEFICIAL MICRO ORGANISMS IN AGRICULTURE
Agricultural production begins with the process of photosynthesis
by green plants, which requires solar energy, water, and carbon
dioxide. These materials are freely available. Therefore, it can
be defined that "Agriculture is to produce something from
nothing". Although it sounds good, when observed as an
economic activity, present agriculture has an extremely low
efficiency. This is due to the very low utilisation efficiency of
solar energy by plants
The potential utilisation rate of solar energy by plants has been
estimated theoretically to be between 10 and 20%. However, the
actual utilisation rate is less than 1%. Even the utilisation rate
of C4 plants, such as sugar cane which have a high photosynthetic
efficiency, barely exceeds 6 or 7% during the maximum growth
period. The utilisation rate is normally less than 3% even for
producing optimum crop yields.
Past studies have shown that photosynthetic efficiency of the
chloroplasts of host crop can not be enhanced much further. This
means that their biomass production capacity has reached a
maximum. Therefore, the best opportunity for increasing biomass
production is to utilise the visible light, which chloroplasts can
not presently use, and the infrared radiation. These together
account for about 80% of the total solar energy. We should also
explore ways of recycling organic energy contained in plant and
animal residues through direct utilisation of organic molecules by
plants.
In the presence of organic matter, photosynthetic bacteria and
algae can utilise wavelengths ranging from 700 to 1200 nm. Green
plants do not use these wavelengths. Fermenting micro organisms can
also breakdown organic matter, thereby releasing complex compounds
such as amino acids for plant use. This increases the efficiency
of organic matter for crop production Thus a key factor for
increasing crop production is the availability of organic matter,
which has been developed by utilising solar energy and the
presence of efficient microbes to decompose these materials. This
increases the utilisation efficiency of solar energy.
