In The Farm That Won’t Wear Out, Hopkins concluded that: “the intelligent improvement of his soil, in systems of permanent agriculture, is the most profitable business in which the farmer and land owner can engage” . Each of Hopkins’ three books found publishers in their day, but not since, and his three works are now all but forgotten a common fate of agriculture books written a century ago. Having quit the USDA, King embarked on an eight month oriental agricultural tour. He arrived in Yokohama in February 1909 and toured extensively in China, Japan, and, to a much lesser extent, Korea . King died with the book incomplete—it lacks the final chapter and hence his conclusions. In the Introduction to his book, King explains his project: “We had long desired to stand face to face with Chinese and Japanese farmers; to walk through their fields and to learn by seeing some of their methods, appliances and practices which centuries of stress and experience have led these oldest farmers in the world to adopt. We desired to learn how it is possible, after twenty and perhaps thirty or even forty centuries, for their soils to be made to produce sufficiently for the maintenance of such dense populations.
We were instructed, surprised and amazed at the conditions and practices which confronted us whichever way we turned; instructed in the ways and extent to which these nations for centuries have been conserving and utilizing their natural resources” . King foresaw a world movement for agricultural re-form: “China, Korea and Japan long ago struck the key-note of permanent agriculture, but the time has now come when they can and will make great improvements, and it remains for us and other nations to profit by their experience,dutch buckets for sale to adopt and adapt what is good in their practice and help in a world movement for the introduction of new and improved methods” . The publishing history of Farmers of Forty Centuries has been uneven, but it is now enjoying a ‘golden era’. In the decade just passed, sixteen separate publishers offered editions of King’s book. This new proliferation has coincided with technological advances and opportunities including the development of print on demand technologies for book production, faster scanners, opportunities for short run publishing, online international bookshops, for example Amazon.com, and developing opportunities for order taking and fulfilment, all facilitated by the lapse of copyright and by the growing interest in organic agriculture.
With the proliferation of Farmers of Forty Centuries Although the book Farmers of Forty Centuries continues to gain currency, its defining meme, ‘permanent agriculture’, has gained little traction. The 1929 book Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture is a rare ex-ample which has, since King and Hopkins, used the term as a defining element of its narrative. ‘Permanent agriculture’ was appropriated and contracted to generate the neologism ‘permaculture’ which appeared in the 1978 Tasmanian book of Mollison & Holmgren: Permaculture 1: A perennial agriculture system for human settlements . The contraction is confirmed in the title of the second volume: Permaculture Two: Practical design for town and country in permanent agriculture . in digital and print formats, its future now seems secure. The ‘rescue’ of the book by the London publisher Jonathan Cape in 1927 was a resurrection for the book which was, by then, all but forgotten. The consensus of endorsement of the book by the early organic agriculture pioneers was itself an endorsement of the decision by Jonathan Cape to republish, and it was the London editions that they referenced, rather than the original. Firstly was the timing. King’s championing of soil husbandry was contemporaneous with the development of synthetic fertilizer technology by Haber and Bosch . King’s book preceded the chemical industry’s development of synthetic pesticides, and the US seizure of German chemical patents.