Miyazaki Yasusada gathered nearly forty years of experience and observation into The Complete Book of Agriculture. In arranging and supplementing the manuscript, he had the help of Kaibara Rakken, elder brother of the Fukuoka domain Confucian scholar Kaibara Ekiken. Ekiken himself contributed a preface and helped send the book out into the world.
In the preface Ekiken says roughly this:
Since ancient times China has had many books on farming, but Japan has almost none that describe farming in detail. Japan's climate and soil differ from China's, and Chinese books cannot be used as they are. Miyazaki Yasusada tilled the fields himself for many years, traveled the provinces asking old farmers, consulted Chinese books too, and gathered methods of farming suited to Japan's land. This book is truly useful to farmers.
In 1697, The Complete Book of Agriculture in ten books (eleven with the supplement) was published by a Kyoto bookseller. That summer, as if he had waited to see it published, Yasusada died at seventy-five.
As the first full-scale farming manual published in Japan, The Complete Book of Agriculture was quickly and widely read. Tokugawa Mitsukuni of the Mito domain is said to have praised it after reading it: "This is a book the world cannot do without for a single day."
It was reprinted again and again through the Edo period, and it prompted the writing of one farming manual after another suited to local conditions across the country. In the time of the eighth shogun, Yoshimune, too, it was valued as a book for encouraging agriculture.