Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and JapanFor more than 40,000 years, Asian farmers worked the same fields repeatedly without sapping the land's fertility and without applying artificial fertilizer. How they accomplished this miraculous feat is described by author Franklin Hiram King, a former official of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. King traveled to Asia in the early 1900s to learn how farmers in China, Korea, and Japan were able to achieve successful harvests century after century