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“Three of [Franklin Hiram King] seven books were written during that period, the best known of which is Farmers of Forty Centuries, or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, which recounted his investigations into what would now be called organic farming or sustainable agriculture during a nine-month tour of Asia in 1909. The last chapter was completed after his death by his wife, Carrie Baker King. The book was published in 1911 and was described by Lord Northbourne – the founder of organic agriculture – as a “classic” which “no student of farming or social science can afford to ignore”.
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“We have not yet gathered up the experience of mankind in the tilling of the earth; yet the tilling of the earth is the bottom condition of civilization. If we are to assemble all the forces and agencies that make for the final conquest of the planet, we must assuredly know how it is that all the peoples in all the places have met the problem of producing their sustenance out of the soil.”
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