ELIOT COLEMAN & THE SMALL FARM RESEARCH ASSOCIATION

Enlarge Image Image Gallery

Eliot Coleman, his wife Sue, and their two daughters live next door to Helen and Scott Nearing "way up in the state of Maine". Up where the short growing season and the poor soil make it impossible to raise a good garden . . . let alone pay for a homestead almost entirely with the produce you grow. Right? Wrong! Because Eliot and Sue are not only raising a showplace garden and buying their homestead with the produce they sell . . . but they're doing it all without the chemicals and the gasoline-gulping equipment which all of the agribiz magazines and newspapers swear up and down that a farmer "needs" today.

The photos above testify to the Coleman's success. And the bibliography of biological agriculture that Eliot has assembled (and which is printed on the following five pages) should give you a long leg up on the preparations you must make to (we hope) eventually enjoy the same kind of success for yourself. This just may be one of the most important articles we've ever run!

The best place, always, to begin . . . is at the beginning. And intelligent folks usually plunge into a field that's new to them by surveying the work of those who have gone ahead.

And now—for the first time ever, to our knowledge—Eliot Coleman (see his family's homestead, in color, on pages 72—73 of this issue) has made it easy for you to survey most of the milestone work so far accomplished in the field of biological agriculture. Without fighting your way through a deck stacked in favor of any particular sub-school of thought. Without listening to your guide rave and rant against "the establishment". Without all the rather irrational emotion usually exhibited by biological agriculture's "true believers".

Oh, Eliot's a true believer all right. In results . And it happens that he's been realizing some interesting-even spectacular—results with his experiments in biological agriculture. If we're lucky, he might even share some of that work and those results with us in forthcoming issues of THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS ® . For now, however, we're pleased to reprint the following list of books and papers that Eliot has found to be a useful introduction to the field of wholistic gardening and farming.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BIOLOGICAL AGRICULTURE

by
Eliot Coleman
A Publication of TheSmall Farm Research Association
Harborside, Maine 04642

This is a pamphlet for the doubters . . . which, I hope, includes everyone. There are too many unanswered questions for anyone to be a true believer in biological agriculture.