Until relatively recently, almost all Japanese farmers practiced self-sufficient farming; they had some domestic animals, returned the manure and their own wastes to the Land, and fed themselves and their animals with the food harvested from the Land. If one farms thus, it is not at all difficult to be independent, and the blessings (i.e., interference) of the city are totally unnecessary. Even though these farmers are independent, they were poverty-stricken, but this was not at all due to the retrogressive and closed nature of self-sufficient agriculture. Their destitution was due fully to the high-handed plunder of the city. You critics out there! You must not evade the real question. If the farmers of both former and modern ages were destitute because of agriculture's retrogressive character, then why is modern petroleum-based agriculture, as represented by American agriculture, suffering under such onerous debts? There has never been any problem other than that which has always dogged agriculture: the plunder of the city. The problem is that the critics and politicians take for granted their right to fill their bellies without soiling their own hands. Note that the proletariat and farmer literature of the recent past examined in detail the destitution, greed, and ignorance of the farmers, and wrote that almost all of it had been brought about by the high-handedness of the bourgeoisie and the evil landlords, but this is ridiculous. As I demonstrated in Chapter V, the true criminals are the vast hordes of non-tilling, gluttonous idlers, the proletariat writers among them. The landlords, who were held up for criticism as the bad guys, were merely the medium though which the city carried on its plunder. Such off-the-mark literary investigation does not even rate a snort. If, as Shoeki wrote, we establish a system wherein emperors, scholars, and beggars all till the soil and produce their own food, then how can there possibly be "the glory that plunders," "the prosperity of the city," and "the destitution of the country"? Independent Agriculture Let us now imagine a kind of agriculture that is like the natural cycle self-sufficient farming of former times (the kind they told us needed nothing as long as they had salt), but which in addition is not the object of plunder. And, using this as a blueprint, let us see how we can establish it in this modern world, in which modern agriculture is flourishing. Since I have some chickens, I will talk about this from my own experience of chicken farming. If one has chickens then rice is free, vegetables are free, potatoes and fruit are free; things we human beings eat -- that which keeps us alive -- are all free.