Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been meaning to read this book for a long time. Maybe if I'd read when I was first starting out in organic gardening or became interested in sustainable food production, I would have been as taken with it as the huge number of "absolutely fabulous" reviewers apparently are. The thing is that I came to this book after 25+ years of organic gardening and years of trying various methods of growing various plants sustainably, so pragmatism is coloring my review. The methods outlined in this book will not be helpful to most people trying to grow food sustainably in North America. I am not talking about the rejection of chemical ferts and pesticides. I am there with him on that totally. I'm not talking about his focus on growing small, either--he discusses growing food sufficient for a family on 1/4 acre, but he is limiting it to grains (he grows veggies in a large citrus orchard). I am talking about the use of nothing but hand tools, the use of straw as a mulch, the focus on growing three grain crops which depend on a frost-free winter, and the use of flooding for irrigation. I think anyone who has made even a stab at growing food in North America on a small scale can see the problems with this. So there's that. There's also the problem of Mr. Fukuoka's unpaid help. I think it is great for people to go and learn from someone like him, but they work for no pay and live in unheated huts without electricity or running water. In terms of practicality, how many of us are going to have help like that? People seem to not notice this. Finally, I found Mr. Fukuoka's philosophy of nothing means anything and nothing human beings do makes any difference in the grand scheme of things to be despressing in the extreme. The central idea--that you can grow sufficient food sustainably in a small plot--makes sense to me, although in my opinion we have not yet arrived at models that are truly flexible and workable. But outside of that idea, this book's value is mostly in the depiction of one guy's struggle to make people think differently about agriculture in Japan.