Eliot Coleman

Coleman is married to gardening author Barbara Damrosch. For several years, from 1993, they co-hosted the TV series, Gardening Naturally, on The Learning Channel. Coleman and his wife continue to grow and locally market fresh produce.

Coleman became a professionally published author beginning in 1989 with the first edition of The New Organic Grower. In 1995 the winter harvest aspect of his farming entered a new, more comprehensive phase, just as the second edition of the book was coming together. In the decades since, the winter harvest has inspired the creation of The Winter Harvest Handbook and has become one of his favorite areas of applied research.

In 1974, Coleman began periodically visiting farms in Europe to study techniques that might be adapted to the Northeastern United States. He has since made many such investigative tours. The market gardening farms of the Netherlands, France, and Germany have provided much inspiration.

During these years (early to mid-1970s), Coleman experienced hyperthyroidism. He was reluctant to take the advice that removal or destruction of thyroid tissue (thyroidectomy or radioiodine therapy) was necessary, as he felt convinced that dietary choices should be able to help. To his doctors' surprise, the problem subsided without surgery or radioiodine. It is plausible that moving to the sea coast and eating many locally raised vegetables, especially those grown with ample seaweed compost, was related to the onset of hyperthyroidism in his case, as association between increased iodine intake and onset of hyperthyroidism is today well known, although not common. This would explain how Coleman could recover without surgery or radioiodine therapy, as although hyperthyroidism caused by Graves' disease or thyroid cancer would be very unlikely to respond to dietary therapy alone, hyperthyroidism caused by dietary intake can predictably revert with a change in diet.

He graduated from Williams College in 1961. In 1968, Coleman and his first wife, Sue Coleman, moved to a farm in Maine, situated on land purchased from Helen and Scott Nearing, as part of the back-to-the-land movement. Their first child, Melissa Coleman, was born there the next year. Coleman taught himself how to farm organically in the harsh Maine climate, and developed many of the cold-weather growing techniques for which he is known. As did the Nearings, the Colemans developed their farm into a learning center for people interested in natural and sustainable agricultural practices.

Coleman has often turned to published agricultural research in seeking ways to continually improve his farming methods. He has pointed out that agricultural science has often shown a bias toward basic research but that applied research is more valuable to organic farmers. For example, although it is nice to investigate advanced chemistry, running trials on which compost recipe is most favored by a particular cultivar of Brassica, and a thousand other practical topics, represents important and valuable applied science. He has pointed out that such useful practical research was often done in the United States before 1940 but not as much since then. He has observed that Dutch organic farmers today do a lot of practical innovation and trials and share the information with each other, although much of this useful research never gets formally published. He relied on much self-education, including much library time, to bootstrap his knowledge, and he encourages his readers to do so as well.

Eliot Coleman (born 1938) is an American farmer, author, agricultural researcher and educator, and proponent of organic farming. He wrote The New Organic Grower. He served for two years as Executive Director of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), and was an advisor to the U.S. Department of Agriculture during its 1979–80 study, Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming, a document that formed the basis for today's legislated National Organic Program (2002) in the U.S.