During a nine-month field investigation into agri-culture in Northeast Asia in 1909, former U.S. Department of Agriculture official, Franklin Hiram King discovered a system of agriculture virtually unknown in the West. In his subsequent book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, he wrote “[we were] instructed in the ways and extent to which these nations for centuries have been and are con-serving and utilizing their natural resources, surprised at the magni-tude of the returns they are getting from their fields.”