The roots of the natural farming motion lie within the dedication of farmers who enrich their soils by means of pure strategies. These conventional, farmer-managed, soil-improving processes have been changed by bought merchandise from off the farm.
Prioritize natural soil care to provide clear, chemical-free meals and be a part of us in embracing a more healthy, extra sustainable future for meals and farming!
The next excerpt is from The Self-Fed Farm and Backyard by Eliot Coleman. It has been tailored for the net.
“Each well-managed soil ought to develop richer reasonably than poorer; and, talking broadly, the farm ought to have inside itself the ability of perpetuating itself.”
— Liberty Hyde Bailey, The State and the Farmer (1908)
Preface: Again to the Roots
When the natural rising motion started a few years in the past, the pioneering farmers created and maintained their fertile soils by partnering with the earth’s sources. They sowed inexperienced manures and canopy crops and shallowly tilled them into the soil, they grew legumes so as to add nitrogen, they devised efficient crop rotation methods for management of plant illnesses and weeds, they unfold rock powders as pure mineral sources, they made soil-nourishing compost from regionally out there, pure natural wastes, they used manure from their very own livestock, and so forth. They created an exceptionally clear, protected, self-contained manufacturing system. These days it’s a a lot totally different world. These conventional, farmer-managed, soil bettering processes have been changed by merchandise—bought merchandise from off the farm.
My best concern is in regards to the questionable high quality of the compost merchandise out there for buy at this time. Compost has at all times had a status for goodness amongst natural growers.
However what in regards to the unavoidable residual environmental contamination of the components from which the quite a few municipal-waste and confined-livestock composts marketed at this time are made—contaminants equivalent to pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, veterinary medication, hormones, heavy metals, and the like? Bought inputs of industrially suspect manure from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) or bought compost made out of the municipal waste stream have turn out to be simply as a lot of a crutch for at this time’s natural vegetable growers as chemical fertilizers are crutches for chemical farms.
Sadly, these bought organic-in-name-only inputs not meet the normal pure requirements for inputs at all times related to natural farming. The producers of economic composts are paid to eliminate waste merchandise. Most of these composts, that are enthusiastically utilized by many natural vegetable growers, aren’t the high-quality compost celebrated by Sir Albert Howard, the famend nineteenth century botanist and sustainable agriculture pioneer. The outward look of the completed compost doesn’t give any clues as to what was disposed of to make it.
One of many principal motivations for 4 Season Farm’s choice for natural soil care has been to offer our clients with meals freed from the chemical air pollution and the economic toxins that pervade our world.
As a result of the one positive strategy to have each a clear in addition to a fertile soil is to develop our personal soil natural matter proper on the farm, that’s what we do. The goal of our “self-fed farm” challenge is to consciously separate our farm’s practices from the industrially influenced, insufficient shortcuts that so many natural farmers now depend on. The goal of this guide is to element the easy and productive strategies we use to attain our purpose of manufacturing clear and nourishing meals in perpetuity.
A press release titled “Natural Farming as Practiced by 4 Season Farm” is proudly posted at our farmstand. It reads as follows:
The favored press defines natural farming by its rejection of chemical compounds.
A greater portrayal defines natural farming by its embrace of the soil’s organic methods.
Classical natural farming is predicated upon the creation and upkeep of a biologically lively fertile soil.
Natural farming succeeds due to the advantages derived from that soil. Natural farmers deal with correcting the reason for pest issues (weak crops) by strengthening the plant by means of optimum soil situations, reasonably than merely treating the symptom (pest harm) by attempting to kill the pests which are interested in weak crops. The manufacturing of pest-free crops and livestock with lively immune methods is a direct final result of natural soil care that, as scientific research have persistently proven, induces pest and illness resistance.
Analysis into the marvelously complicated soil microbiome (and the related human microbiome) is revealing the very important microbiological truths that hyperlink each soil well being and human well being. That analysis underscores the intuitive brilliance of the founding natural farmers.
As a bonus, fertile soil produces meals of the best dietary high quality. That was one of many foremost preliminary goals of the soil care methods that turned natural farming.
Lengthy-term soil productiveness doesn’t require frequent enter of bought fertilizer inputs from off the farm. It may be created and maintained by means of farm made compost, crop rotations, inexperienced manures, cowl crops, nitrogen-fixing legumes, grazing livestock, shallow cultivation, nutrient-dense powdered rock, enhanced biodiversity, and different time-honored practices that nurture the boundless power and logic of the earth. Natural farming is a circle of countless renewal and it’ll succeed wherever there’s soil.
The inclusion of deep-rooting forbs in rotationally grazed grass/legume pastures throughout the rotation helps to take care of fertility and make out there the just about inexhaustible mineral provide from the decrease ranges of the soil. Grazing livestock profit the soil; various pasture advantages the livestock.
Most important of all, since soil fertility on the classical natural farm just isn’t powered by bought inputs from exterior the farm however, reasonably, by simply understood and universally relevant soil administration practices performed throughout the farm, this meals manufacturing system is accessible at low price by farmers in all places and might thus nourish the planet with distinctive meals in perpetuity. As an additional profit, the self-fed natural farm avoids the unintended introduction of business contaminants from exterior the farm which is a perpetual menace to the purity and integrity of inputdependent methods.
Introduction
By Dan Barber, Blue Hill at Stone Barns (July 2025)
I first realized about plant well being from Eliot Coleman once I was a school senior, deep within the throes of ultimate exams—which is to say, I used to be procrastinating. As a substitute of finding out, I wandered the library’s stacks, flipped by means of periodicals, made journeys to the merchandising machine, and browsed the newest arrivals laid out on the picket desk by the doorway. That’s once I first noticed The New Natural Grower. Its creator, Eliot Coleman, appeared out from the quilt with the form of blue-eyed conviction that prompt he knew one thing the remainder of us didn’t.
He did. Eliot’s thought—that wholesome crops grown in wholesome soil are naturally immune to pests—arrived on the excellent second for a school senior with obscure anarchist sympathies (actually, only a liberal arts main) hungry for concepts that had been each radical and elegantly easy.
Feed the soil, and the tiny creatures residing in it, with care and a spotlight, and pests will nearly at all times be incapable of inflicting harm.
I didn’t but notice that Eliot’s dirt-first dogma would turn out to be the inspiration for my very own cooking. Chemical farming, I made a decision, was much less a necessity than an elaborate misunderstanding. “Fact to energy,” would have been one thing I muttered to myself, delighted by a worldview that turned standard knowledge on its head.
Eliot, for his half, is fond of claiming that the microbes within the soil needs to be fed first—allow them to have first decide on the buffet, they usually’ll deal with the remaining. It’s an ecological “should you construct it, they are going to come”—besides that should you feed the soil, the great microbes and vitamins will keep and, finally, the pests will go away.
My radicalism tempered with age, however a decade after that first encounter with Eliot’s work, I had the great sense to succeed in out to him for assist in designing the farm at Stone Barns Middle for Meals & Agriculture, which might turn out to be the house of my restaurant, Blue Hill. Eliot’s job was to establish the perfect land for rising robust, wholesome greens with out chemical intervention.
I’ve informed the story of his first go to to the positioning extra occasions than I can depend, as a result of that crisp November afternoon in 2002 marked yet one more turning level in my life as a chef.
As the sunshine light on that chilly, slow-burning day within the time of yr finest identified for its impression of perpetual nightfall, Eliot walked forward of me, surveying the fields. He’d initially settled on a flat, wholesome stretch of land, however then we got here to an extended, upward-sloping subject beside the biggest of the stone barns, as soon as the guts of the property’s dairy operation. Eliot paused, scanning the six-acre expanse. “The cows in all probability pastured right here,” he mused.
Then, in a flash, he dropped his bag and, in a transfer extra harking back to a border collie than a guide, began working—darting throughout the previous pasture, weaving between rocks and thistles, head swiveling to trace the setting solar. He handed what would later turn out to be rows of tomatoes, cucumbers, fava beans, and parsnips, lastly reaching the best level, the place he raised his finger to the sky. Then he was off once more, making his strategy to the northeast nook, stopping finally, fingers on hips, to check the land.
Even in his early sixties (and nonetheless at this time), there was one thing wild and hopeful in his actions—curious, observant, energized by a deep, intuitive connection to nature, and full of the hopeful power of somebody who finds pleasure within the chance that the perfect reply just isn’t the apparent one. I watched in awe.
“Hey, freaking cool,” he grinned as he returned, his blond hair gleaming within the fading gentle, eyes extensive and glowing. “That is the sphere. Neglect the opposite one. I’m getting hungry simply desirous about what you’ll develop right here.” I requested if he’d modified his thoughts primarily based on the angle of the solar. “The solar? Oh, hell, no. I used to be simply admiring it. No, I wished to make certain this had been pasture for the cows.”
Eliot defined that fields closest to the barns had been often essentially the most closely grazed—and thus essentially the most richly fertilized by manure. On this case, he was proper; we later confirmed that this pasture had as soon as been grazed by the Rockefeller household’s dairy herd.
He scooped up a fistful of soil and turned his hand so I might see: “Black sufficient for you?” he laughed, marveling at its richness. Within the dying gentle, I stared at his handful of earth, realizing that the true recipe for nice cooking isn’t a recipe—it’s an thought. The thought is to honor the astonishing community of microscopic life within the soil—the complete periodic desk of parts, supplied up should you let it.
Till then, I’d held on to 2 easy misconceptions: that chemical farming kills soil by poisoning it (which it will probably), and that consuming these chemical compounds is unappetizing and dangerous (which it in all probability is). However each miss the chef ’s bigger level.
Chemical farming starves the soil’s complicated group, depriving it of something good to eat—and, in doing so, robs soil of its pure resilience and meals of its taste.
“Why restrict the hand that feeds you?” Eliot requested, studying my thoughts. “Considering we will substitute a couple of soluble parts for a complete residing system is like believing an intravenous needle might ship a scrumptious meal.”
What a pleasure, then, to introduce this new guide and discover Eliot’s concepts as very important and radical as ever, now distilled right into a sensible information for anybody who desires to feed the farm that feeds them.
On this sense, what you’re holding is a pantry cookbook—and I imply that as the best praise. Eliot’s blueprint for nourishing the soil with what’s already readily available is as accessible for each residence gardener and farmer as it’s important.
That Eliot Coleman has continued, decade after decade, to deepen his pondering, remaining someway each radical and accessible, is a testomony to his curiosity, his generosity, and his refusal to just accept the world as it’s handed to him. Might these pages do for you what Eliot as soon as did for me: immediate you to look down, dig in, and notice that the revolution remains to be attainable, and that, due to it, our meals will style good.
Beneficial Reads
It All Begins with Soil: Wholesome Soil Means Wholesome Vegetation
