Organic pioneer Eliot Coleman defends intelligent tillage and green manures as tools for building and sustaining fertility
Acres U.S.A. You have a new book — The Self-Fed Farm and Garden — what inspired you to write this book?
Eliot Coleman. This book is about a lot of subjects that have been on my mind for a while as I have watched organic sort of get cheapened by its association with a lot of ideas from the wider world. One of the ones that most bothered me recently was a bunch of potential organic farmers who have been preaching that all you have to do is purchase enough commercial compost to cover your farm six inches deep. If you do that, they say, then all of a sudden you’ll have no weed problems because the weed seeds that are six inches down won’t make it to the surface. You’ll have a very fertile field, and all you have to do is put seeds in there and you have an instant organic farm. It seemed like so many of the things today, where people don’t want to take the time to do what needs to be done to move into a new game.
Acres U.S.A. Right. It takes time to build up the soil. You couldn’t do it instantly like that.
Coleman. These are people, I guess, who have no idea what building the soil seems to mean. If they think they can do that by just laying down six inches of compost, they are woefully misinformed.
Acres U.S.A. If you could sum up the most important theme of your book in one sentence, what would that be?
Coleman. In one sentence, the theme is to return organic to the systems with which it began, and that supported it, during its early years. And by that I mean processes, not products.
Acres U.S.A. You give a really solid historical case for defining organic farming as the biological soil and health-centered system, not just input substitution or a marketing label. Do you think it’s possible to reclaim the word “organic” and restore it to its original meaning?
Coleman. That’s a very good question. I’ve been working with the Real Organic Project for many years now in order to try and keep the USDA from being able to include hydroponics and CAFO livestock in their definition of organic. The USDA was the wrong organization to give control of organic when it was just burgeoning into something legal because they have always been against it, and they are not any better now than they were all of those many, many years ago when these first ideas surfaced.
When these ideas first became common, we were told by every professor at every university in the country who was involved in agriculture that what we were trying to do was impossible. And yet I have a copy on my shelf of the 1938 Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, and it reads like an organic farming textbook. They knew all these things. They were just trying to prevent the ideas from getting any more currency than they had. And they did a powerful job of objecting to what all of us “alternative” farmers were saying and doing.
Acres U.S.A. How do you feel about the current movement? Many people think the word “regenerative” is better now than “organic.” How do you feel about all that?
Coleman. It was Bob Rodale who first suggested the use of that word in order to make organic sound more like it was on top of modern thinking. Rodale’s present “regenerative organic” just causes more trouble because it puts those two words together. The farmers who are presently celebrating regenerative are just large-scale Midwestern farmers who spent many decades degenerating their soil using chemical farming technologies and now they’re trying to pretend that they can solve all of that and erase all those defects by claiming they have a new system which they’re going to call “regenerative.” And it’s the usual hype and shallow presentation that the USDA has been doing with organic since the start.
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