School of Sustainability

From Fukuoka's Japan to a farm outside Tandil

Twenty-four years ago Damián Colucci arrived in Tandil, in Buenos Aires province, without knowing he would stay forever. The land was a field his father had bought near the hamlet of El Gallo, and Colucci gave it a name - Monte Callado, the silent mount. He is still there, working the same ground he walked onto as a young man, and the desire that brought him, the account says, remains intact in him today.

The threads of the story were being spun long before the needle was threaded. From very young, Colucci knew he wanted to live in nature. Each step he took was deliberate and toward that one objective. But it was never a matter of simply going to the country and doing anything; there was a conviction behind it, a wish to find alternatives that set themselves clearly apart from the conventional models of agricultural production.

He was barely a teenager when he first heard of Masanobu Fukuoka, the Japanese farmer known around the world as the father of natural agriculture. Alongside that, he felt drawn to Eastern culture generally, and to Taoism in particular. The article that tells his story is titled for an arc - from Japan, by way of Greece, to Tandil - that frames his life as a long passage toward natural farming, though the portion available to us closes there, directing readers to Tierra Viva for the rest.

Regeneration International · Read the source