Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan — Context and Discussion

The Scientist as Traveler

King’s narrative voice is that of a methodical observer who is also personally present. He records the price of a steel-pointed plow ($2.15 gold) and the fact that it is carried home on the farmer’s shoulders, but he also describes his own failed attempt to plow a straight furrow. The first-person perspective is consistent: “We had been twice over the road between the two cities.” This is not a detached survey but a journey with setbacks—lost in the dark, unable to find an interpreter, relying on a German traveler’s hotel advertisement. The pace of the writing mirrors the travel: slow, attentive, with sudden shifts when a new detail or encounter occurs. King’s voice remains calm and respectful, never condescending, even when he admits his own limitations.

Numbers That Ground the Argument

King’s most striking rhetorical device is the rapid calculation of population density from a single farm visit. After learning that a family of twelve lives on 2.5 acres with a cow, a donkey, and two pigs, King immediately extrapolates: “192 people, 16 cows, 16 donkeys and 32 pigs on a forty-acre farm.” This arithmetic recurs throughout the excerpts, compressing vast scales into concrete figures. The effect is to make the reader feel the intensity of land use without abstract statistics. King does not argue for or against these methods; he simply presents the numbers as facts that challenge Western assumptions about farming. The pace here is brisk, almost breathless, as if the calculation itself is a discovery.

The Plow as a Cultural Artifact

King devotes careful attention to the plow he borrowed from an old farmer. He describes its steel point, cast-steel moldboard, wooden standard and sole, and the depth-gauge block at the beam’s end. Then he notes its cost and the fact that it is “carefully housed” after use. This description is not merely technical; it connects to a longer history: “Chinese history states that the plow was invented by Shennung, who lived 2737-2697 B. C.” King does not verify this claim but reports it as part of the farmer’s cultural inheritance. The pacing slows here, allowing the reader to consider the weight of that forty-century span. The plow becomes a symbol of continuity, and King’s own act of holding it—and being judged by the farmer—bridges the gap between observer and observed.

King’s book is best read as a field notebook that happens to be a treatise. The reader should attend to the moments when the author’s voice shifts from the personal to the statistical, and back again. The excerpts do not reveal whether King’s larger argument about permanent agriculture is fully developed, but they show a writer who trusts concrete detail over abstract principle. For those interested in the history of sustainable farming, this work offers a rare, firsthand account of practices that had sustained dense populations for millennia—and a reminder that the most profound agricultural lessons are often learned by walking someone else’s furrow.