Eliot Coleman and Fred Kirschenmann are deservedly regarded as the two living “philosopher kings” of our modern organic movement. Eliot borrowed heavily from the wisdom and practice of early nineteenth-century advocates of agricultural “improvement”, distant ancestors of our modern organic farming movement, and Europe’s intensive market gardeners who once fed cities like Paris, to create the exemplary farm he’s operated since 1968 on Maine’s rocky shores. It’s ironic that Coleman holds out and instructs from that now remote agricultural outpost, where forest has erased much of post-colonial agricultural history, from 1700s ‘stump farming’ days to domination of American potato production until the 1950s. Maine lost out when agricultural “improvers”, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, lost vociferous debates on the floors of Congress over corralling American populations east of the Appalachians, where they would necessarily develop proper soil husbandry skills to survive, versus unleashing them upon unexploited virgin soils “out West”. We are familiar with the outcome of that story. Soil scientist David Montgomery, author of Dirt and Growing a Revolution, argues that “humans have been mining soils to feed ourselves for 12,000 years.”

Prior to the industrial revolution and Justus von Liebig’s unlocking chemical secrets of plant nutrition, all that soil mining, or “de-generating” as Eliot puts it, took place utilizing organic farming methods. Environmental historian Angus Wright, in Nature’s Matrix argues [Read more…]