Eliot Coleman (born 1938) is an American farmer, author, agricultural researcher and educator, and proponent of organic farming. He wrote The New Organic Grower. He served for two years as Executive Director of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), and was an advisor to the U.S. Department of Agriculture during its 1979–80 study, Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming, a document that formed the basis for today's legislated National Organic Program (2002) in the U.S.

On his Four Season Farm in Harborside, Brooksville, Maine, on Cape Rosier, he produces year-round vegetable crops, even under harsh winter conditions (for which he uses unheated and minimally heated greenhouses and polytunnels). He even manages to grow artichokes, claiming that "I grow them just to make the Californians nervous."

Coleman is married to gardening author Barbara Damrosch. In 1968, he and his first wife, Sue Coleman, moved to a farm in Maine, situated on land purchased from Helen and Scott Nearing, as part of the back-to-the-land movement. Their first child, Melissa Coleman, was born there the next year. Coleman taught himself how to farm organically in the harsh Maine climate, and developed many of the cold-weather growing techniques for which he is known. As did the Nearings, the Colemans developed their farm into a learning center for people interested in natural and sustainable agricultural practices.

In 1974, Coleman began periodically visiting farms in Europe to study techniques that might be adapted to the Northeastern United States. He has since made many such investigative tours. The market gardening farms of the Netherlands, France, and Germany have provided much inspiration.

The first edition of Coleman's The New Organic Grower was published in 1989. In 1995, the winter harvest aspect of his farming entered a new, more comprehensive phase, just as the second edition of the book was coming together. In the decades since, the winter harvest has inspired the creation of The Winter Harvest Handbook and has become one of his favorite areas of applied research.

Organic farming principles

In his writing, Coleman promotes small-scale organic farming practices and sustainable agriculture. One of his central principles is "small is better," advocating business growth through improved production and marketing, rather than physical expansion. He also favors direct relationships with customers; the relationships can take many flexible forms,

His principles also include favoring the biologic over the technologic, and the preventive over the corrective, when seeking solutions to agricultural challenges. He readily advocates technology wherever appropriate (including inventing new hand tools and agricultural machinery), but he tries to get the resiliency of life itself to prevent problems, in preference to using technology to fix them after they have developed. It is this principle, as well as the gradual dilution of the connotations of the word organic, that leads him to prefer the word biologic rather than organic as the best description of his methods.

Like many organic farmers, Coleman advocates the prevention-not-treatment approach to weed control. He therefore favors fast, light, frequent cultivation with purpose-built hoe types, skimming weed seedlings off the soil surface with an action that is more like shaving than chopping (hoes "like razors rather than axes"

Coleman is a leader in developing and sharing the concept that in season extension a distinction can be made between extending the growing season and extending the harvest season. He has pointed out that agricultural science has often shown a bias toward basic research but that applied research is more valuable to organic farmers. He thus points out that food should be local and next-day or same-day fresh,

Sources

  • Seedsman Hall of Fame Biography