Episode #249
Eliot Coleman: The Self-Fed Farm

In this special episode, Real Organic Project co-director Dave Chapman sits down with legendary farmer and author Eliot Coleman to discuss his upcoming book, The Self-Fed Farm and Garden: A Return to the Roots of the Organic Method. Coleman’s new work challenges the modern organic movement to return to true self-sufficiency – producing fertility from within the farm rather than importing manure or compost from questionable sources. From the beauty of rye-vetch rotations to the philosophy of biological farming, Coleman lays out a clear path for soil-grown farming in an era of contamination, corporate shortcuts, and hydroponic confusion. His message is simple: we can grow everything we need, right where we are.

Our Eliot Coleman interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Eliot Coleman at Four Season Farm in Maine, August 2025.

Eliot Coleman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I am visiting Eliot Coleman, again, blessedly and happily. Hey, Eliot. I want to talk about a number of things, but I want to start by talking about “The Self-Fed Farm and Garden: A Return to the Roots of the Organic Method.” This is Eliot’s book, which is going to come out in November, when we’re going to release this interview.

Dave Chapman 0:31
I think it’s a very important book. I’ve read it, and I wanted to talk to you about it. This is something that you had some hesitation about writing, or at least about publishing, because you thought your ideas might be unpopular. But I think the ideas are very important. I think you do, too. Do you want to talk a little bit about why this is a subversive book?

Eliot Coleman 1:01
All of the new, young, organic hot shots are smart enough to be convinced that organic matter in the soil is the key to everything working on an organic farm, and that knowledge has been known forever. The only thing is, they haven’t been selective about where they’re getting their organic matter. There isn’t any organic manure available if somebody wants it.

Eliot Coleman 1:38
So, any manure is going to come from conventional farms, and unfortunately, most of it comes from CAFOs. There was a blog from a large wholesaler, and they had put together a complaint against the Center for Food Safety that was demanding the USDA ban all CAFO manure, and less-than-pure manure and compost, from organic farms.

Eliot Coleman 2:27
They went berserk about this, because they said, “Well, that’s the end of organic, because there’s no organic manure out there.” First, that means they weren’t paying attention to reality, because it isn’t only manure and compost that have been providing organic matter for organic farms, but green manures.

Eliot Coleman 2:52
Green manures have been a major source for years. When we first started, that was something we used an awful lot of.

Dave Chapman 3:02
Eliot, excuse me, not to be too simplistic, but we will have people listening to this who don’t know what a green manure is. Could you just explain that?

Eliot Coleman 3:12
In the book, I pause at one point and refer to them as soil-improving crops. These are crops that you grow specifically to turn back into the soil. All the nutrients they contain can be broken down by the soil microorganisms into forms that other plants can use.

Eliot Coleman 3:40
If you have – and that picture isn’t in the preliminary thing – but there’s a picture at the start of the book, when it’s published. It’s a picture of looking across a field, with beautiful crops in the foreground, and in the background is a six-foot-tall wall of rye and vetch in one of the many strips in that field that were being prepared.

Eliot Coleman 4:17
That’s the whole book in a nutshell, because it’s showing that you can get all of this organic matter without having to buy compost or manure, or take the risk of getting compost and manure that aren’t pure, by just growing all the organic matter you need yourself.

Dave Chapman 4:40
Can I just say that you once corrected me, I think when I said something about cover crops. You said, “It’s not just a cover crop; it’s a green manure.” In other words, it’s not just there to hold the soil. It’s not just a catch crop between crops. It’s actually growing a manure that will enrich the soil.

Eliot Coleman 4:59
Right. There have always been two names – green manures and cover crops – for what I’m talking about. But once the no-till passion showed up, everybody was taught to stop using green manure, because that meant they were being tilled into the soil to mix them in and get them started on the breakdown.

Eliot Coleman 5:27
Whereas a cover crop just sits there on the surface. Maybe you treat it with glyphosate, but you’re not tilling it in. Everybody for a while there stopped using the term “green manure.” At that point in the book, I said, “Maybe we would be better off calling it “a soil-improving crop.”

Eliot Coleman 5:57
The beauty of that is you have to figure out how to fit these crops in to your cropping scheme, because they obviously have to grow when it’s possible to grow things. But if you grow them for a whole season, you haven’t been producing any crops to sell. So, the secret with soil improving crops is to grow them at times of the year when you’re not growing your staple crops that you’re going to sell.

Eliot Coleman 6:29
That is like late fall and through the winter, or at other times of the year. I often have thought if I were down south, where it gets too hot in the middle of the summer to grow good vegetables, I would just stop growing vegetables, put the farm in a very heat resistant grain manure, and then come back a couple of months later and go back into vegetables.

Eliot Coleman 7:05
They are capable of being fit into almost anybody’s crop rotation, because there are times of the year When you are not growing your for sale crops.

Dave Chapman 7:22
Yes, and of course, you can also rotate land so that one year you just have a green manure, and then the next year you go back to your cash crop.

Eliot Coleman 7:33
I cite in the book a study from New Jersey in 1950. A researcher down there referred to this not as green manure, but as land resting. He said that the soils in New Jersey, used for market gardening, were going down in productivity every year because they were cultivated every year.

Eliot Coleman 8:13
He found out that if you put a field into a pasture crop – that was why he called it land resting – and not graze it, mow it, or remove anything, just leave it there from the time you plant it until you finally turn it under, that was worth doing because the rest, let’s say, in a three-year rotation, in the other two years, your yields were so much higher from having it there.

Eliot Coleman 8:16
Other people, over the years, especially people like Robert Elliot, who was in favor of ley farming, where you grew field crops and had animals eating them off and then put that back into other crops. But people have found that land coming out of sod is almost like virgin soil again. There are an enormous number of roots of a sod crop there.

Eliot Coleman 8:16
This study from New Jersey was fascinating because if you left it in there one year out of three, you got higher yields from the other two years that made up for the fact that you lost a whole year of yields when the sod crop was there.

Dave Chapman 9:37
That’s interesting. I just want to say for people, and it’s wonderful that there are, as you say, two traditions, or two traditional ways of bringing that organic matter into the garden – into the farm. One is to compost animal manure, primarily, but also crop residues. The other is to grow it and till it in and let it break down right in place.

Dave Chapman 10:05
They both were very valid and worked very well. Of course, Albert Howard was obsessed with making compost, and he became the spokesperson for organic farming in the 40s and 50s. But one of the things you’re saying is that our manure sources are no longer to be trusted.

Eliot Coleman 10:30
They are not the pure product that Sir Albert Howard was talking about, nor is the compost coming from municipal waste compost. My God, what do you expect? The whole idea of making compost commercially is to take some organic matter and convert it into something that’s usable. Once you turn it into compost, there’s no way of knowing what it started out as. It’s a great way of hiding it.

Dave Chapman 11:07
Yeah. It’s a big thing. Of course, at Churchtown, there will be a whole workshop on sewage sludge, which was spread in many fields in America, and a lot in Maine, and of course, it was toxic waste. It turns out that it was very long-lasting, and the people who are farming on that land are getting sick from it, as well as their customers.

Eliot Coleman 11:37
The interesting thing about sludge is that, from what I understand, all sludge in Europe is spread on farmland. So, whether they aren’t aware of a PFAS problem, that is how they have traditionally gotten rid of their sludge. It’s enough to make me not want to eat in a French restaurant again.

Dave Chapman 12:10
It’s interesting, both as our world gets more polluted with misbigotten chemistry, but also as we become more aware of things that we’re doing, and we didn’t realize there was a problem, and now we do. The other tradition, besides making really good compost, that was the foundation of good biological farming, was green manuring.

Dave Chapman 12:36
There’s a long tradition of that, just as there’s a long tradition of composting. What’s interesting is that composting was especially used by the intensive market gardeners. They lived outside of the cities. They brought back horse manure. They took in their products to sell. They brought back the manure and composted it on the farm.

Dave Chapman 12:58
It was a beautiful symbiotic cycle, but it’s not working as well now. We have real concerns. You’re making a call to arms, saying, “Yes, there’s the other way.” It’s slightly less intensive in the use of the land, but certainly your farm is very intensively managed, and it produces a lot of food per acre. So, it can be done very well just using green manure.

Eliot Coleman 13:31
There are articles that I have read by leading academics that organic can never feed the world because there isn’t enough manure. They actually say that in there. I’m wondering, “Wow, where have you guys been? There are these things called green manures, where you can grow all the organic matter in place on your farm in the parts of the year when you’re not growing vegetables.”

Eliot Coleman 14:07
This has been totally forgotten, to the point where a lot of the people who do talk about green manures say the way to use them is to have livestock and have it graze it off so you get manure out of it that you can then use.

Eliot Coleman 14:30
But first off, if the livestock graze off your green manure, you have lost about 20% of the nutrients in there, because they’ve been absorbed into the livestock. If you’re running a vegetable farm and you have livestock on there to turn your green manures into animal manure, all of a sudden you have a problem.

Eliot Coleman 15:01
You never worry about marketing lettuce or broccoli, but in order to market your livestock, they have to go somewhere and be slaughtered specially, and things like that. That isn’t a great way to turn your green manure organic matter into something you can use.

Eliot Coleman 15:26
Then compost is another thing. Compost doesn’t make itself; you have to make it. We no longer take our vegetables to a place where we’re prepping them and then cutting off all the tops and everything. We do that in the field. We go out of the field with a cart that’s set up with a flat top.

Eliot Coleman 15:54
Let’s say we’re harvesting leeks. We’re peeling the bad stuff off the side of leeks, we’re cutting off the roots, we’re chopping the tops, and we’re leaving all that in the field. Then finally, we take these almost prepared leeks and hose them down and put them in crates and sell them. But nothing is going to the compost area.

Eliot Coleman 16:22
Now, the minute a bed is finished… we used to be using our land so intensively that I had to go out and pull all the roots out by hand, and then we would take all that to the compost heap. We’ve expanded our land base enough. I can now go out there and till all those residues in and then plant a green manure on that, and come back in a month or two months.

Eliot Coleman 17:00
Not only do I have more organic matter than I had before, but it’s already starting to break down, which it has to do in order to provide nutrients for future crops. When you think of it, green manures are sort of the great ignored miracle. That was why I wrote the book. I got thinking about all these things, and I said, “Well, heck. We’re missing something important here.”

Dave Chapman 17:30
Let me ask you a couple of questions about that, because we’ve talked about all this for years. It’s very interesting. A long time ago, I remember you said that Helen and Scott’s garden was always beautiful, but it ramped down in its vitality over time, and it became a mature soil. You said there was something about the freshness of when you first incorporate the sod, and the next year is just glorious.

Dave Chapman 17:59
It makes me wonder about two things. One is the rotting plant matter in the soil, and the other is the impact of the roots, which is different from if you just grew it in one field, chopped it, and put it on your field and tilled it in. I suspect that that’s a bit different from growing it in the field and tilling it in. What are your thoughts about that?

Eliot Coleman 18:23
Yeah. That’s that New Jersey research that I mentioned, where part of the land was put in sod, ungrazed or unmowed, and just left there – land resting. You ended up better off because of that. If Scott and Helen had known to use something like that, it would have made a difference.

Eliot Coleman 18:55
I learned that because we would have sections of this farm that didn’t quite have these fields ready to till and put in vegetables. They’d be in sod, whatever had come in. The first year we tilled them up, the time I really learned about it, we were growing some pretty nice cauliflower.

Eliot Coleman 19:23
But one year, I saw cauliflower that looked as nice as mine, or maybe even nicer, in the co-op, and they were buying it from a guy who I’d never heard of before. I looked into it. I said, “Yeah, he just moved here, and he just bought this land and tilled it up.” Well, he was growing it in newly tilled sod, and that was why it looked so beautiful. I’ve always found that coming out of sod gives you a heck of a benefit.

Dave Chapman 19:58
Have you ever had any curiosity about a living mulch in the path, or whatever, so that you have the roots in the plants? You can mow the path and blow it. I know it’s not what your model is, but I’m just curious if you have ever experimented with that?

Eliot Coleman 20:12
There are people who are always talking about that sort of system, where “You’re going to be getting organic matter to blow in under your crop and let it rot down.”

Dave Chapman 20:33
It’s essentially Hugh and Lisa Kent’s system. They have blueberries, they set them wide, and then they mow the whole space between. It’s beautiful, and it gets better every year.

Eliot Coleman 20:45
See, first off, they’re dealing with perennials, and perennials have always been mulched and let the nutrients come down into them. But where I’m growing annuals, I’ve always found that using a rototiller and mixing the organic matter in helps break it down more effectively. I would call this biological farming, as opposed to organic farming, because it’s the soil biology that I’m taking advantage of.

Dave Chapman 21:23
All right. When Scott and Helen were doing their beautiful garden, and you were learning from them, they were pretty much all compost. Is that right? Did they cover crop at all, or use green manures?

Eliot Coleman 21:38
No, no. Scott would occasionally have some cover crops in there. But then again, they were always harvesting seaweed from the shore, and that was the major ingredient in their compost. They made beautiful compost, and so that was an outside input that they didn’t have to buy. They just had to collect it on the beach.

Eliot Coleman 22:08
I have stopped using seaweed on this farm because… There was a report in the Bangor Daily News that the Indians who have an island north of Bangor had told their people not to eat the fish out of the Penobscot River anymore, because there was a large landfill just north of their property that was leaking PFAS into the river.

Eliot Coleman 22:46
That river runs down here past the beach where I’ve been getting seaweed. That was a little worrying. So, I hired one of these PFAS testing companies. God, they charged me $1,100 to come and do it. They came and took seaweed off the beach, and they found out it was pure as could be, because I was concerned that I’d been building this up.

Eliot Coleman 23:18
At that point, even though it was still pure, there were so many other places in the water where pollutants could come from. I just thought it just wasn’t worth continuing to bring that in.

Dave Chapman 23:35
Just to say, you’ve been doing this for some years now, of the self-fed farm, of not bringing in…

Dave Chapman 23:41
About 10 years.

Dave Chapman 23:43
About 10 years, and you have not seen a decline at all in your crops?

Eliot Coleman 23:48
No, not at all. They get better and better.

Dave Chapman 23:53
Even better, okay.

Eliot Coleman 23:54
The quality of the soil – if you look out there in one of those fields and see a six-foot-tall rye vetch green manure toward the end of its first summer, the amount of organic matter in the straw and especially the roots – a lot of the theorists on green manure think that roots are the things that are actually making the enormous difference in adding organic matter.

Dave Chapman 24:28
Yes. This is beautiful, but let me ask a question as somebody who grows in a greenhouse, and you do a lot of growing in a greenhouse. What would you do in the greenhouse – do you still bring compost into that?

Eliot Coleman 24:43
We do make some compost from the crops that we can’t just harvest and leave the residues in the field. Like greenhouse tomatoes, they’re producing a long time, and finally, at the end of the season. So, they’ll go to a compost area.

Eliot Coleman 25:03
That compost is used in our one non-movable greenhouse. But in all the movable greenhouses, I can grow green manure on there for two, three months, till it in, and then move the greenhouse back over that area.

Dave Chapman 25:24
So, I shouldn’t have abandoned my movable greenhouse?

Eliot Coleman 25:28
Yeah. You were the one who took the first leap in looking into that, and you were definitely astute.

Dave Chapman 25:39
No, it’s a beautiful thing. I just ended up with these glass greenhouses that don’t roll easily, although you have shown me a book that had pictures of movable glass greenhouses. They’re beautiful and have big railroad wheels and tracks.

Eliot Coleman 25:53
The day I was in the Netherlands and first saw one of those, the bottom of the end walls folded up, and there were two Dutchmen behind each back corner. They were slowly pushing this thing because they moved easy enough that that much muscle would push it. When that idea started, everybody at the time was just ecstatic, because of the amount of work they had been doing digging up the soil to try and renovate it again, and it turned out that…

Dave Chapman 26:49
Or fumigating it.

Dave Chapman 26:52
This is the pre-fumigating…

Dave Chapman 26:55
I talked to Mark [inaudible 26:58], and he said, when hydroponics came to Holland, and he was a young man at the time, he remembers they put in one bay of hydro as a test, and they didn’t like the way the plants looked, and they said, “This will never be repeated.” But then the yields were 25% higher, so the next year, the entire house was hydroponic, and nobody ever looked back.

Dave Chapman 26:55
The reason I think that they were so pleased, and part of why the yields were higher, is because they were growing tomatoes after tomatoes, and eventually they got a disease build-up in the soil, and they could steam it, or they could fumigate it, or they could dig it out.

Dave Chapman 27:40
All of those are very hard and expensive, and obviously fumigation is very dangerous for the people doing it. So, yeah, greenhouses are something where we still need to keep brainstorming to figure out how to do it best.

Eliot Coleman 27:59
I’m just using the three green manures. We use the most of peas, oats, bell beans, and things like this. But I could put that area next to the movable greenhouse into sod for a couple of months, and I think I would see better yields than the hydroponic people because I have biologically renewed the soil.

Dave Chapman 27:17
That’s right. We just need to find a market for grass.

Eliot Coleman 28:06
But the grass is there for a purpose.

Dave Chapman 28:46
No, I don’t mean for that. I mean for a non-movable house. So, we have a problem. We have a very expensive cloche, a very expensive cover on the ground, and it would be pretty challenging to retire it for a year. But I completely hear what you’re saying about the movable house. I go, “Oh, I shouldn’t have gotten away from it. It makes all the sense in the world.”

Dave Chapman 29:12
So, I think what your book is talking about – just to bring it back to your book – is this is something that once you have equipment to deal with the mature… I assume you’re using a flail mower of some kind and then you’re tilling?

Eliot Coleman 29:27
Yes.

Dave Chapman 29:28
And so you flail it. I think you back over it with your tractors because the flail is behind?

Eliot Coleman 29:33
That’s because the way I handle the rye vetch planted in October is I let it grow to the middle of August the following summer, and the rye straw is six feet tall, and the vetch vines are, and I wait for a very dry day. I lift the plate on the back of my plow mower. I’ve taken off the depth roller, because I want this thing to be just skimming the surface of the soil. I back through there, and that mows everything down to almost ground level.

Dave Chapman 30:19
The flail mower breaks them into very short pieces.

Eliot Coleman 30:21
Yeah. So, I have this chopped straw of rye and vetch over an enormous number of rye and vetch seeds. In fact, if you look at the yield you will get from a rye field, it is 20 times the seeding rate that’s recommended if you’re planting rye as a green manure.

Eliot Coleman 30:46
All those seeds are underneath there; the first rain germinates them. They grow up through the straw. It looks like a golf fairway. That’s there through the next winter, and the following April, 19 months after I first planted it, I till all that in.

Eliot Coleman 31:06
By then, there is new growth on the overwintered vetch, new growth on the overwintered rye, and nitrogenous growth that helps break down the rest of the straw. This has just been an unbelievably successful system.

Eliot Coleman 31:25
But the reason I like it, if I read carefully a lot of the studies in all the old books on green manures, they are hinting at the fact that just annual green manures aren’t going to do it, because you’re probably just disturbing the soil more than once for them.

Eliot Coleman 31:50
But this is not an annual crop that I’m turning under: it’s a mature crop. There’s straw and everything, and I’m only tilling it once a year. This has been, I think, the single greatest use of a long-term green manure to build up the soil on this farm.

Dave Chapman 32:14
It’s beautiful. You’re doing it with a tractor. I’m just curious, you also have a BCS here. If you did it with a small walking tractor, would that be practical? Or is it really a lot better to do it with a tractor?

Eliot Coleman 32:30
No, we have our BCS set up with axle extensions so the wheels can run in the one-foot path on either side of the 30-inch bed. So, it’s basically just tilling up the bed completely. That would work fine.

Dave Chapman 32:56
Then you could also use a flail mower on that…

Eliot Coleman 33:00
You would want to, because with certain green manures, you’d probably snarl things up pretty badly.

Dave Chapman 33:12
You’d want to flail first.

Eliot Coleman 33:14
Yeah. When I’m mowing my mature rye vetch with the flail mower with the back removed, I don’t go fast. I go very slowly to make sure that it has sufficient time to chop all that up.

Dave Chapman 33:34
Yeah, that’s great. This is different from making compost and then spreading compost. It’s a different technology. You get the equipment, though. You get the equipment to drill the seed, and then you don’t do anything after you’ve drilled until it’s time to flail. Is that right?

Eliot Coleman 33:53
Yeah, or time to till. Sometimes they don’t need to flail them. When you drove in, you passed a beautiful field of buckwheat.

Dave Chapman 34:03
Yes, I did.

Eliot Coleman 34:04
Every time I drive by that, it’s just so beautiful. It’s saying, “This field is increasing in fertility.”

Dave Chapman 34:14
You have buckwheat, sometimes in some places, depending on the period of time you have, and then you have the rye vetch, depending on the time that you have. You said you use oats and?

Eliot Coleman 34:28
Oats and peas. It’s probably our most popular overwintering green manure. We’ll plant it in September and get great growth on it, and then it winter kills. Come April, you can rake off the residue if you want to, and not till, or you can till it in to add that extra organic matter to the soil.

Eliot Coleman 34:59
So, overwintered green manures are great. They’re ones like bell beans, which is a legume – very, very deep-rooted. Again, it will get winter killed, but they’ve done an awful lot of good for the soil. But the best thing is that the green manure plants are improving my soil in situ while I sleep. I don’t have to do anything. So, from the point of view of getting more bang for the buck, that’s pretty good.

Dave Chapman 35:46
I’ve tasted your crops, and they’re awesomely good. I regret that I’m not your neighbor because I would like to eat them, and I have not had the time to do the garden myself. But this is very inspiring, and I think your book is going to inspire a lot of people. It’s interesting.

Dave Chapman 36:06
Let me tell a little story about you, Eliot. I remember when you were younger, and I was younger, and you used to do vitamins. You would say, “Let’s do some vitamins.” You took a lot of supplements because you were kind of looking for super health, and then you abandoned all that, and you said, “You know what? I think good food is where we get our vitamins.”

Eliot Coleman 36:24
Yes. It was just a conclusion you come to after thinking about the fact that there’s an awful lot of propaganda out there to convince you that vitamins are good. But it’s probably like the propaganda out there trying to convince you that purchased organic soil stimulants are better than what you could grow.

Dave Chapman 36:52
Yeah. All right. Everybody, coming up in November, “The Self-Fed Farm and Garden: A Return to the Roots of the Organic Method” is coming out, and I really recommend that every farmer and every gardener get a copy and see what it does to your thinking. That’s great.

Dave Chapman 37:17
I’m very proud that at the Churchtown conference in September, we will have the first copies available in the country before the actual release date of November 8th.

Eliot Coleman 37:30
Yeah, before the release.

Dave Chapman 37:31
Yeah, that’s great. I want to turn away from that for a minute and talk about Joan Gussow. Joan was our friend, your very dear friend. She died this year, at 96 years old, I think. We can’t say they took her too soon. She had an amazing life. She was teaching until she was 92 or 93 years old. She was an amazing person.

Dave Chapman 38:08
As you know, I’m talking to people who knew Joan and cared about her, to hear their stories about Joan – their perspective on her life and her work. What have you got to say?

Eliot Coleman 38:14
Long before anybody from academia was willing to say nice things about organic as a method of agriculture, not just organic food, Joan was saying it. There is an artist up here who does a series of portraits, which he calls “Americans Who Tell the Truth,” and he did one of Joan.

Eliot Coleman 38:49
Since he knows I was a great friend of Joan’s, he gave me a copy of the picture. I have it on the wall behind my desk. There are times when I’ve done Zoom talks and the Zoom camera in my computer can see this picture on the wall behind my desk.

Eliot Coleman 39:14
Joan saw one of those things, and she said, “Oh, I was so flattered.” I said, “Well, the reason he gave me the picture is because I told him that you were a great buddy of mine and you were important, but I keep it there because you’re my favorite old hippie.” She said, “Oh, good. I’ve always wanted to be an old hippie.”

Dave Chapman 39:41
How did you meet Joan? How did you run into each other?

Eliot Coleman 39:45
Running into her at conferences and things like that. I have behind me here – if it’s where it should be – “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology.” This is a book she put out a long time ago, and it has all sorts of articles by people who she probably shouldn’t have been celebrating, but she was celebrating. It’s a fantastic book.

Dave Chapman 40:30
I think it’s out of print now.

Eliot Coleman 40:31
It is out of print. It’s impossible to get used copies of it.

Dave Chapman 40:34
I tried to get it and I couldn’t get it used.

Eliot Coleman 40:37
But somebody should…

Dave Chapman 40:40
Reprint it.

Eliot Coleman 40:42
The subtitle is “Issues in Nutritional Ecology,” and that’s basically what she was talking about. But oh yeah, the stuff in here is so good. If nothing else, just having read through that…

Dave Chapman 41:05
What was so fresh about Joan’s thinking at that time? I think now it’s become much more common, but at that time, what was she saying that wasn’t being said much?

Eliot Coleman 41:20
Rather than putting organic down, she was praising it. But I’ll tell you another thing: her husband, Alan, who was a great artist, came to do a couple of lectures at the Mountain School when I was there.

Eliot Coleman 41:46
One of the projects he did on a hillside that you could see from the main campus was to get together a bunch of students with spades and send them around all the pastures where our cattle were grazing, collecting cow pies. He drew out a shape of a cow grazing on the hillside with lime. The students then went along with their spades, sticking one in the soil and placing a cow pie in it, and then he planted rye seeds.

Eliot Coleman 42:32
In about three weeks or a month, the cow pie cow stood out on this field. But it just reminded me of the fact that these two people were both brilliant about teaching what was going on here. I’ve never forgotten the cow pie cow.

Dave Chapman 43:00
Did Joan ever come up here to your farm to see this?

Eliot Coleman 43:05
I can’t remember whether she did or not.

Dave Chapman 43:09
Did you go to her place?

Eliot Coleman 43:10
I used to stop down at her place whenever I had a chance. She had a great library. There are a lot of people whose work I have read who are under-celebrated in the scientific world, but she had all of their best books and everything. I wonder what’s happened to her library. I wonder if some university is going to…

Dave Chapman 43:48
I’ll ask Pam Koch. She would know. She’s taking care of all of that stuff at Joan’s house.

Eliot Coleman 43:57
This is just a case where one of the great people in the organic movement passed on, and fortunately, she was old enough, so we’ve had enough time to celebrate her.

Dave Chapman 44:11
Dan Barber thought that her work would be much more well known in 20 years. I thought that was interesting.

Eliot Coleman 44:22
I think he’s right.

Dave Chapman 44:26
He said her work was so important, and so many people who are better known than her have embraced her work and used it as their launching pad. I’ve talked with her and interviewed her several times, and we had that wonderful dinner at Stone Barns all together. She was great, but I haven’t read all of her books. I can’t even find The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, so I would like to. Her course sounded so good.

Eliot Coleman 44:59
You can just take this home with you on loan.

Dave Chapman 45:01
Thank you, Eliot. Okay, on loan. All right. I thought that her course sounded amazing, and I think it was life-changing for many people – her Nutritional Ecology course. It made me want to go to college, which I never did. But I thought, “Wow, that would be worth going to college for.”

Eliot Coleman 45:24
Well, it was just a good course. When I first moved here, we were just starting to clear this land, and I needed to earn a little something. So, I used to work three mornings a week with Scott Nearing in the woods. We were cutting timbers for a new woodshed he was building. That was the best college history course you could ever have imagined. He’d been everywhere, done everything.

Dave Chapman 46:06
He had been a college professor also.

Eliot Coleman 46:08
Yes. But to have the opportunity to exchange ideas intimately with someone, taking a course from Joan would have been just as fantastic.

Dave Chapman 46:22
Yeah. I think by the end of her career, she said, “I’m really not a nutritionist.” I thought, “What an interesting thing for somebody who was the head of nutrition for 40 years at Teachers College.” But she felt that it was too limited and it was too influenced by industry, and she was looking at a much bigger picture, always.

Dave Chapman 46:47
A bigger picture of what nutrition is and what food is, and how can you look at nutrition without looking at food, and how can you look at food without looking at how it was grown? She created that cycle of saying, “We actually have to understand agriculture if we want to understand health.”

Eliot Coleman 47:06
That is why my book is talking about the importance of how the soil is grown in is treated as far as the quality of food that’s being produced.

Dave Chapman 47:20
You had a pretty close relationship to Scott and Helen Nearing.

Eliot Coleman 47:33
I was very, very fortunate, yeah. I wouldn’t be here on this farm today if they hadn’t sold me 60 acres of the back of their farm for $2,000. Helen said, “Okay, we’ll sell you the back half of our farm.” She said, “How much money do you have saved up?” $2,000 is all my first wife and I had. She said, “Okay, well, that came to $33 an acre.”

Eliot Coleman 48:11
It made up for the fact that this was all covered with spruce and fir forest and rocks and everything, and it’s taken a while to make it look like it does now. But in a world where nobody does things like that, that was such a nice thing to do. We now have 40 acres left, but it’s because we have sold pieces of that for the same $33 an acre to friends.

Eliot Coleman 48:49
My favorite story in this – this is back when, come on, these little winches cost $33 – I sold an acre to this guy, and he gave me a, “Come on. That’s the most ideal real estate transaction I can imagine.”

Dave Chapman 49:14
One of the things that certainly – I don’t know that you got it from them, but you shared in common – is a willingness and a desire to work very hard. All of you – Helen, Scott, and you – honored work not as a chore, but as…

Eliot Coleman 49:37
It’s what dignifies being alive. It’s what makes life worth living. In fact, when I finished that book and turned it in to the publisher, I was thinking, “Oh, God, I need another project.”

Dave Chapman 49:58
Are you thinking about your next project?

Eliot Coleman 50:00
No, it won’t be a book. But my next project… When we leased the farm, all the greenhouses and all the equipment, all of the tractors went, and so I bought myself another tractor.

Dave Chapman 50:16
I saw someone sitting out in the yard there.

Eliot Coleman 50:18
We have land out behind this house that isn’t part of the farm, on the other side of the driveway. I’m running all sorts of trials with green manures out there, because when we first began this farm, we had access to a large horse manure pile at a neighboring farm.

Eliot Coleman 50:39
God, I used to bring in so many loads of that. It made me wonder if we could have created the fertility we now have with just the green manure system that we’re now maintaining it with. So, I’m running trials on two recently cleared acres out there.

Dave Chapman 51:02
Land that has not had anything brought in and added to it.

Eliot Coleman 51:05
Nothing added to it. Maybe some lime, a few things like that. It’s going to be interesting to see how long it takes to get that land up to the standards that we know here as fertile, maybe four years possibly. But when we were first here, I didn’t have the time to wait four years before we put this farm in business, and were able to sell stuff. We did it with a horse manure pile on a neighboring farm.

Dave Chapman 51:47
Excellent, Eliot. May you have another 15 years to see this through. Scott lived to be 100 years?

Eliot Coleman 51:57
Yeah. I’m 86 years old.

Dave Chapman 51:59
You’re 86 years old. He was a tough guy. Sometimes, maybe in the next interview, we’ll just talk about Scott and Helen, both amazing people. That’s for next year.

Eliot Coleman 52:16
Okay.

Dave Chapman 52:16
I know that we have a dinner to go to, but before we close, are there any last thoughts you’d like to add?

Eliot Coleman 52:24
No, it’s just delightful to talk with you, Dave, about anything to do with agriculture, because you have been so effective in trying to save organic from the misdirection that the USDA has either, probably intentionally but maybe unintentionally, led it into. If organic has, in the future, any validity to it, it will be from the effort that the Real Organic Project has made. So, thank you.

Dave Chapman 53:06
Thank you, Eliot. That’s very high praise. We’re all trying. We are. It’s so interesting. I’ve interviewed so many people now. I don’t know where we’re at – 250 interviews or something. You look back and you see this army of people, and they’re all doing the work. We’re just still scratching the surface.

Dave Chapman 53:29
There are 1,000 farmers who have chosen to be certified with Real Organic Project, and there are thousands more who don’t even know about us or haven’t gotten to that place. Many of them are not certified with the USDA. We understand all that – we understand why.

Dave Chapman 53:46
But that’s an interesting conversation. I love that debate between Patrick Holden and Lady Eve about whether certification is a worthwhile thing or a mistake.

Eliot Coleman 54:06
What Patrick Holden and the young Turks of the day wanted was to sell their produce at a higher price. They were not at all concerned about the philosophy of organic farming and everything. Lady Eve thought the Soil Association should be concerned with the science of organic farming rather than the immediate economics of it, because she thought that if it was grown better and tasted better, it would sell. But they wanted instant recognition.

Dave Chapman 54:53
I agree with you about Lady Eve. I would say, certainly Patrick and Peter Segger were very idealistic and had deep beliefs in organic, but they were also trying to figure out how to make a living and how to have it spread so that many small farmers could do this and make a living, and many people who were looking for that food could find it.

Dave Chapman 55:16
So, I really do think it’s not a simple… I can’t imagine saying, “Well, one side’s right and one side is wrong.” They both have truths, and they both have failures. For sure, we see Patrick and Peter’s ideas led to the USDA, which was, for many – not for you, not for me – we didn’t consider a success. But later I thought I was wrong.

Dave Chapman 55:40
Later, I thought, “It actually has led to good outcomes.” Then later I decided I was wrong again, and I said, “No, it’s actually led to some real problems.” Both of those realizations were true. There’s been a tremendous growth.

Dave Chapman 55:58
You see the young people who are taking over your farm and taking over my farm. They came up in the organic movement, which was widespread, and that’s wonderful, and many of them are really heartfelt. They believe in it, and they become very good farmers in the process.

Eliot Coleman 56:14
But the problem is that the merchandisers, the wholesalers, have none of the ethics that the early farmers did. Because, as far as they’re concerned, the more stuff out there called organic, the bigger the market. That is not where, in my mind, I want organic farming to be making its impression.

Dave Chapman 56:45
Yeah. It’s strange to watch regenerative do the same thing exactly. I talked to Gabe Brown just briefly – we didn’t have an intimate conversation. But some years back, we were at a conference together, walking down the hall, and I told him what we were doing. He said, “Yeah, I don’t really care about certification. It just doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Dave Chapman 57:08
I thought, “Well, sure, you don’t care about it, it doesn’t mean anything. You’re one of the best marketers in America. You’re brilliant at it.” He’s fantastic. But now he cares a lot, and he started something called Regenified. It’s not pretty what they’re doing. I don’t believe it’s what he had in mind when he started.

Dave Chapman 57:35
It certainly doesn’t appeal to me. It just ignores the use of chemicals – it doesn’t address it. It’s a conundrum because I do think that certification and standards have a place, that it’s important, and there’s always this pressure to compromise.

Eliot Coleman 57:59
Here we are. Back when my wife Barbara was the president of MOFGA, I was known as the elephant in the room because her husband was one farmer who wasn’t certified with the USDA. But we have never been certified. None of the customers who come give a darn about it, because they’ve tasted the food. It tastes better than what Driscoll’s, and these people are turning out with their hydroponic fakes, and they’re well aware of that.

Dave Chapman 58:46
Okay. Let me challenge you. Larry Jacobs, whom we both love – I have nothing but the most profound respect for Larry and Sandra, and the work that they’ve done their whole lives.

Eliot Coleman 59:00
He worked here in his first years.

Dave Chapman 59:04
That’s right. He was on the Nearing’s crew. They might have met, and they might not have met. Anyway, they came, traveled around the world, and started their own farm in California, and they started that brilliant cooperative in Mexico, Del Cabo. They sell their product as Jacobs Farm Del Cabo.

Dave Chapman 59:27
In one of my interviews with Paul Hawken, he said, “Yeah, they do everything right, except for one thing.” I said, “What’s that, Paul?” He said, “They don’t tell their story. Their story is amazing. If they told it, people would know…” He said, “I saw their stuff in the marketplace, and I just thought, ‘Yeah, right, another corporate thing.’ Well, it’s not. It was at that point thousands of small farms selling under one label.”

Dave Chapman 59:54
I know that they were very serious about making it real organic for their farms. They hired and trained their own extension agents to go and work with the farmers and teach them how to do it right. They had their own research for them and their climate and soil. It was really a beautiful thing.

Dave Chapman 1:00:15
I said all this to Larry. He said, “We tell our story.” I said, “You do?” He said, “Yeah, our food tells our story. You taste it and you know it’s real – you know it’s good.” I said, “Your food is good, Larry, but I’m sorry, that’s not enough. I promise you, the other guys who are trying to put you out of business are telling their story, and the difference is their story is not true. All you have to do is figure out how to tell the truth, and people will come flocking to your brand.” I believe that.

Dave Chapman 1:00:48
Now, Eliot, you’re selling directly from your small farm to your group of customers, and I wish I was one of them, but the reason they started that cooperative is because all these people in Baja California, they didn’t have anybody to sell to.

Dave Chapman 1:01:05
All their neighbors were farmers doing the same thing. They had no market, and because they did this and organized it, they were able to thrive. In fact, now the cooperative is run by their children who went to college paid for by the money they made as part of Del Cabo.

Eliot Coleman 1:01:23
Yeah, that’s great. Larry’s story is definitely worth telling.

Dave Chapman 1:01:31
He’ll be at Churchtown too, so you can see him there.

Eliot Coleman 1:01:55
Oh, good.

Dave Chapman 1:01:37
I think that there’s a lot of different kinds of agriculture. I love what you do, but I also love what Full Belly Farm does, and I certainly love what Del Cabo is doing. It’s like, “Well, how do we make it?” Plus, I like to drink coffee. I don’t know any coffee farmers, so I’m going to have to get it from people I don’t know, and certification is the only way I have of trying to find the right stuff.

Eliot Coleman 1:02:04
Oh, I see. But certification is useful when the food is grown by somebody far away who you don’t know. Our customers know us. They can talk to us. They are perfectly capable of deciding on their own that this is valid, that we are doing it the right way.

Dave Chapman 1:02:29
Yes. The one thing I’ll add to that is the reason to become involved with the group is that you are involved with the Real Organic Project deeply. I’ve had certification people complain to me, saying, “You sure let Eliot Coleman talk a lot on your website and interviews. He’s not even certified.” I said, “You have to be kidding me. The guy practically invented organic in America, and you’re complaining because he didn’t get certified.”

Dave Chapman 1:02:59
I think that’s truly a mistake. I think that’s so short-sighted. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a reason to get certified and to come together. I was talking to Deborah Koons Garcia in our interview, and she said, “Yeah, in the old days, we would show our film in all these theaters, and people would come together, and I would go and speak, and they’d be so excited.”

Dave Chapman 1:03:22
I said, “Yeah, now it streams to everybody’s home, and they watch it on a screen at home.” It’s still wonderful, very easy to spread ideas that way. It’s not the same as people coming together and watching it together, is it?

Eliot Coleman 1:03:35
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:03:36
You’re in a situation where your people come together, but the farmers need to come together, too. There needs to be a movement. I know you’ve done more than I’ve ever done to build that movement and to wake people up and say, “We have got to do this, and we are going to have to work together somehow.”

Eliot Coleman 1:03:58
Yeah. I think we’re getting closer, though. People ask me, “What kept you going? What got you into this?” I say, “Back when I started, the Vietnam War was going on, and anybody with different ideas was getting shut down because the dominant paradigm was so overwhelming.”

Eliot Coleman 1:04:36
I said, “Farming this way on a daily basis, I subvert the dominant paradigm about as effectively as it can be subverted, because I’m proving it wrong, at least in agriculture.” I said, “There was no way to get satisfaction in the old days, because the paradigm we were up against was so powerful and so connected.”

Eliot Coleman 1:05:10
But this is my little rebellion on my own. Every day when we were taking truckloads of food to the local food co-op, and customers were lining up to get it, those were victories that we couldn’t get any other way.

Dave Chapman 1:05:35
All right. Thank you, Eliot. Thank you very much. That’s beautiful. So, let’s close with that.

Eliot Coleman 1:05:40
Okay. Thanks, Dave.

Dave Chapman 1:05:42
All right.