Great interview with Eliot Coleman at The Real Organic Project for his new book, “The Self-Fed Farm.”

Coleman argues that vegetable growers can effectively generate their soil fertility with Green Manures.

To the layman, the city-dweller, this sounds like obscure, agricultural jargon. Eyes roll. Why should anyone care about this?

Because it’s so totally critical, let me break it down for you:

1) Everyone survives by eating food.

2) While it is perfectly possible to survive by just eating plants, of course, the meat that is eaten is first fed on plants we grow.

3) Growing vegetable and grains is extractive. So if we want to keep eating food, and, er, living... we have to engineer properly sustainable ways of making a contribution back to that fertility. This is what Sir Albert Howard called “The Law of Return.”

4) Industrial agricultural systems cheat the replacement of macro-nutrients (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium) by importing them to the growing site at great expense to the farmer and the environment. As for micro-nutrients - they usually don’t even bother providing them for the soil, which leads to a reduction in their presence in the food we eat that these Industrial systems produce.

5) Other agricultural systems also import fertility to the farm. This includes Organic as well as Regenerative (for which there is no legal framework and is basically a free-for-all). With Organic this can be animal manures or other organic matter which feeds the soil microbiology.

6) Eliot Coleman and a few other innovative Organic farmers argue that, rather than importing this Organic matter to the farm, it is possible to grow plants called Green Manures. These can be legumes like clover, vetch, alfalfa, and peas, or non-legumes such as mustard, rye, buckwheat, and phacelia. If these plants are grown in a farmer’s rotation, and then chopped down into the top four inches of topsoil (not deep digging which would damage the soil), they can provide all the fertility that the soil requires. Furthermore, as the Green Manures break down on the surface they produce carbonic acid which etches valuable minerals out of stone in the top and subsoil.

It’s a system as elegant as it is brilliant. Not a new idea, but one which needs all the publicity it can get. It has been elbowed to one side by not just Industrial agriculture, but also Regenerative agriculture. The latter, with its emphasis on No Till, to the delight of herbicide manufacturers who can keep on selling Glyphosate to farmers, has vetoed even the minimal tillage that the system Coleman describes requires.