"Nature Farming" was established in 1936 by Mokichi Okada, the founder of the Church of World Messianity, an agricultural system originally called "no fertilizer farming" or 自然農法 (shizen nōhō) in Japanese.
Offshoots such as the Sekai Kyusei Kyo, promoting ‘Kyusei nature farming’, and the Mokichi Okada Association formed after his death to continue promoting the work in Japan and South-East Asia.
According to the International Nature Farming Research Center in Nagano, Japan, it is based on the theories that:
The term is sometimes used for an alternative farming philosophy of Masanobu Fukuoka.
Natural Farming
Another Japanese farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka, conceived of an alternative farming system in the 1930s separately from Okada used the same Japanese characters to describe it. This is generally translated in English as "Natural Farming" although agriculture researcher Hu-lian Xu claims that "nature farming" is the correct literal translation of the Japanese term.