Eliot Coleman

Career timeline

In 1968, Coleman 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.

During these years (early to mid-1970s), Coleman experienced hyperthyroidism. He was reluctant to take the advice that removal or destruction of thyroid tissue (thyroidectomy or radioiodine therapy) was necessary, as he felt convinced that dietary choices should be able to help. To his doctors' surprise, the problem subsided without surgery or radioiodine. It is plausible that moving to the sea coast and eating lots of locally raised vegetables, especially those grown with ample seaweed compost, was related to the onset of hyperthyroidism in his case, as association between increased iodine intake and onset of hyperthyroidism is today well known, although not common. This would explain how Coleman could recover without surgery or radioiodine therapy, as although hyperthyroidism caused by Graves' disease or thyroid cancer would be very unlikely to respond to dietary therapy alone, hyperthyroidism caused by dietary intake can predictably revert with a change in diet.

Coleman became a professionally published author beginning in 1989 with the first edition of The New Organic Grower. 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.

Jean-Martin Fortier, another market gardener and published author on the topic, cites Coleman's first book as one of his formative influences.

Principles advocated

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, but he considers them more important societally than organic certification itself.

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. He thus favors soil health (via crop rotation and soil amendments) and locally optimized timing of sowing and harvest as keys to plant health that render most other pest control and plant disease control efforts unnecessary. He advocates accepting external forces (such as biologic and thermal realities) and using them to one's own advantage instead of fighting them with chemicals (as against soil deficiencies, plant diseases, insect pests, and weeds) or with fuel consumption (as against cold weather). 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"). To that end, he developed the collinear hoe (or collineal hoe).

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.

Coleman has often turned to published agricultural research in seeking ways to continually improve his farming methods. 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. For example, although it is nice to investigate advanced chemistry, running trials on which compost recipe is most favored by a particular cultivar of Brassica, and a thousand other practical topics, represents important and valuable applied science. He has pointed out that such useful practical research was often done in the United States before 1940 but not as much since then. He has observed that Dutch organic farmers today do a lot of practical innovation and trials and share the information with each other, although much of this useful research never gets formally published. He relied on much self-education, including much library time, to bootstrap his knowledge, and he encourages his readers to do so as well.

The development of the big business phase of the organic food era has led Coleman, as well as others, to emphasize the ways in which small, local growers can have competitive advantages to keep their businesses strong. At one time just being organic was enough, but now something more is needed to compete. He thus points out that food should be local and next-day or same-day fresh, and that it is best for customers to have personal relationships with growers. On these points, large corporations with long-distance distribution cannot easily wipe out small business competition.

Beyond merely the question of who is able to compete on price, Coleman also explores the very difference between shallow organics and deep organics, which reaches all the way into discussion of economic systems and lifestyles. He questions the very ideas of people buying lots of stuff (including quick fixes to palliate problems, even despite their being organic), buying processed foods at all (even with the organic label), and using long supply chains full of intermediaries; he feels that such ideas are not a smart path to human health (which requires soil health) and are of questionable economic sustainability in that they promote the view of nature as a collection of problems to be solved with purchased palliatives (driving sales) instead of a positive force to be amplified to advantage and with which to align one's efforts. He advocates "real food" (biologic/organic, unprocessed, local, fresh, produced by small businesses).