Eliot Coleman (born 1938) is an American farmer, author, agricultural researcher and educator, and proponent of organic farming.
[1][2][3] 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.[4] 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).
[6] 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.
As did the Nearings, the Colemans developed their farm into a learning center for people interested in natural and sustainable agricultural practices.
[7][8] In 1974, Coleman began periodically visiting farms in Europe[9][10] to study techniques that might be adapted to the Northeastern United States.
[2][14] 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).
[20] 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.
[20] He has observed that Dutch organic farmers today do a lot of practical innovation and trials and share the information with each other,[20] although much of this useful research never gets formally published.
[13] He questions the very ideas of people buying much stuff (including quick fixes to palliate problems, even despite their being organic), buying ultra-processed foods at all (even with the organic label), and using long supply chains full of intermediaries;[13] 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.