The Self-Fed Farm and Garden

In his first all-new book in fifteen years, Eliot Coleman returns organic farming to its ethical roots, exploring the very soul of organic growing. In The Self-Fed Farm and Garden, he presents the organic method as a self-sustaining system rooted in soil health care and shows readers how they can shift to a self-fed model that continually recharges the soil with organic matter, thus allowing the soil food web to provide all the nutrients crops need for healthy growth and excellent yields. Based on his long study of his library of classic farming and gardening books, Eliot re-engineered the way he managed soils and crops at Four Season Farm so that he would never need to purchase off-farm inputs of compost or fertilizer. The self-fed approach combines classic techniques practiced by the pioneers of organic farming: growing green manure crops year-round and shallowly tilling them into the soil, growing leguminous plants to add nitrogen, and devising effective crop rotation systems for disease and weed control. Once you implement a self-fed system, Coleman explains, then you alone--and not the farm and garden products industry--are master of your destiny. A self-fed system is safe from contamination by pollutants, which is a key point in this era of widespread contamination of soil and water by PFAS and other forever chemicals. The self-fed system also has the benefit of far lower expenses than those that rely on purchased fertilizers from off the farm. The book also delves into the underlying causes in the shifts in the organic movement, calling out the erosion of standards in the National Organic Program and the greenwashing of the new trend of regenerative agriculture. Eliot includes specific examples, such as how large corporate interests acted to lobby against those who sought to protect the need for pure ingredients in composts for organic farms. In the book’s conclusion, Eliot describes the next chapter in the life of Four-Season Farm as he and his wife, awarding-winning garden book author Barbara Damrosch, step away from the farm-scale production, making space for a new farming couple to steward the land.