by David Rainoshek, M.A.

This file is HUGE in terms of understanding the Organic Imperative for person, community, society, and planet. Authentic Farming is a term Eliot Coleman coined after the USDA and modern agribusiness decided that “Organic” was profitable enough to try and compromise so that more agribusinesses could stick the label on and make money, even though the food was irradiated, GMO, etc. The term Authentic puts a finer point on where we want our food, agriculturally speaking. Enjoy.

Eliot Coleman is one of the world’s most knowledgeable organic farmers, with over 40 years experience on the coast of Maine, where he harvests – in unheated greenhouses that anyone can construct – 35-40 varieties of fresh greens YEAR ROUND. He lines it up in his books, listed in this file. Enjoy the photos of his beautiful farm.

A very special book list chosen from over 40 years of Organic Farming experience by Eliot Coleman, owner of Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine.

This little book was presented to me by Alden, Head Gardener at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center 2007-2009. I scanned it in, and returned it. Now you get to read it. This book is placed in the program because Nature Farming is a good illustration of what makes for good health: understanding natural processes and providing for the process without trying to “engineer” it. Another great book on this subject is “The One Straw Revolution” by Masanobu Fukuoka.

By Masonobu Fukuoka

The classic book on Nature Farming by the expert who discovered and cultivated this means of growing food.

Call it “Zen and the Art of Farming” or a “Little Green Book,” Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book “is valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical. It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture because it is not just about agriculture.”

Trained as a scientist, Fukuoka rejected both modern agribusiness and centuries of agricultural practice, deciding instead that the best forms of cultivation mirror nature’s own laws. Over the next three decades he perfected his so-called “do-nothing” technique: commonsense, sustainable practices that all but eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizer, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort.

Whether you’re a guerrilla gardener or a kitchen gardener, dedicated to slow food or simply looking to live a healthier life, you will find something here—you may even be moved to start a revolution of your own.

By Masonobu Fukuoka

Doing nothing, being nothing, becoming nothing is the goal of Fukuoka’s farming method, an approach to agriculture which he has pursued for over forty years with resounding success. With no tillage, no fertilizer, no weeding and no pesticides he consistently produces rice, barley, fruit and vegetable crops that equal or exceed the yield per acre of neighboring farmers who embrace modern scientific agriculture. The basis of his philosophy is that nature grows plants just fine without our interference so that the most practical approach is to get out of the way. In the course of explaining his reasoning and methods, this do-nothing farmer delivers a scorching indictment of chemical agriculture and the human assumption that we can improve on nature. He explains the beneficial role of insects and plants usually characterized as pests, the fallacy of artificially boosting fertility with petrochemical concoctions, the logical error implicit in the use of farm machinery or draft animals, and why pollution is an inevitable result of misguided attempts to improve on nature. Calculation of the energy input versus the caloric output of various farms results in the surprising discovery (perhaps it shouldn’t be) that (minimal) human labor is the most efficient way to produce food. Draft animals add more work and more energy input, small scale machines compound the problem and large scale mechanized agriculture proves to be a vast waste of energy. He calls modern American farmers “subcontractors of the oil industry,” and claims that traditional Japanese farmers on 3-5 acres achieve a real net income higher than American farmers on 500-700 acres.

By Brian Halweil and the World Watch Institute. A beautiful job of laying out the realities of our far-too-well-traveled food supply, with excellent suggestions for what we can begin doing now. From the book: “People everywhere depend increasingly on food from distant sources. In the last 40 years, the value of international trade in food has tripled, and the tonnage of food shipped between nations has grown fourfold, while population has only doubled. In the United States, food typically travels between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometers from farm to plate, up to 25 percent farther than in 1980. In the United Kingdom, food travels 50 percent farther than it did two decades ago.”

88 PAGES of DATA! This is a wonderful file which you can use to see ACTUAL GOVERNMENT DATA showing the types of pesticide residues on nonorganic produce and food products.

By Wendell Berry

Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.

Sadly, as Berry notes in his Afterword to this third edition, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economic system dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are good people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.

By Helen and Scott Nearing

“Helen and Scott Nearing are the great-grandparents of the back-to-the-land movement, having abandoned the city in 1932 for a rural life based on self-reliance, good health, and a minimum of cash…Fascinating, timely, and wholly useful, a mix of the Nearings’ challenging philosophy and expert counsel on practical skills. This one volume edition of Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life brings these classics on rural homesteading together. This couple abandoned the city for a rural life with minimal cash and the knowledge of self reliance and good health.

By Eliot Coleman

If you love the joys of eating home-garden vegetables but always thought those joys had to stop at the end of summer, this book is for you. Eliot Coleman introduces the surprising fact that most of the United States has more winter sunshine than the south of France. He shows how North American gardeners can successfully use that sun to raise a wide variety of traditional winter vegetables in backyard cold frames and plastic covered tunnel greenhouses without supplementary heat. Coleman expands upon his own experiences with new ideas learned on a winter-vegetable pilgrimage across the ocean to the acknowledged kingdom of vegetable cuisine, the southern part of France, which lies on the 44th parallel, the same latitude as his farm in Maine.

This story of sunshine, weather patterns, old limitations and expectations, and new realities is delightfully innovative in the best gardening tradition. Four-Season Harvest will have you feasting on fresh produce from your garden all through the winter.

By Eliot Coleman

Choosing locally grown organic food is a sustainable living trend that’s taken hold throughout North America. Celebrated farming expert Eliot Coleman helped start this movement with The New Organic Grower published 20 years ago. He continues to lead the way, pushing the limits of the harvest season while working his world-renowned organic farm in Harborside, Maine.

Now, with his long-awaited new book, The Winter Harvest Handbook, anyone can have access to his hard-won experience. Gardeners and farmers can use the innovative, highly successful methods Coleman describes in this comprehensive handbook to raise crops throughout the coldest of winters.

Building on the techniques that hundreds of thousands of farmers and gardeners adopted from The New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest, this new book focuses on growing produce of unparalleled freshness and quality in customized unheated or, in some cases, minimally heated, movable plastic greenhouses. Coleman offers clear, concise details on greenhouse construction and maintenance, planting schedules, crop management, harvesting practices, and even marketing methods in this complete, meticulous, and illustrated guide. Readers have access to all the techniques that have proven to produce higher-quality crops on Coleman’s own farm.

His painstaking research and experimentation with more than 30 different crops will be valuable to small farmers, homesteaders, and experienced home gardeners who seek to expand their production seasons. A passionate advocate for the revival of small-scale sustainable farming, Coleman provides a practical model for supplying fresh, locally grown produce during the winter season, even in climates where conventional wisdom says it “just can’t be done.”

By Eliot Coleman

With more than 45,000 sold since 1988, The New Organic Grower has become a modern classic. In this newly revised and expanded edition, master grower Eliot Coleman continues to present the simplest and most sustainable ways of growing top-quality organic vegetables. Coleman updates practical information on marketing the harvest, on small-scale equipment, and on farming and gardening for the long-term health of the soil. The new book is thoroughly updated, and includes all-new chapters such as: *Farm-Generated Fertility-how to meet your soil-fertility needs from the resources of your own land, even if manure is not available. *The Moveable Feast-how to construct home-garden and commercial-scale greenhouses that can be easily moved to benefit plants and avoid insect and disease build-up. *The Winter Garden-how to plant, harvest, and sell hardy salad crops all winter long from unheated or minimally heated greenhouses. *Pests-how to find “plant-positive” rather than “pest-negative” solutions by growing healthy, naturally resistant plants. *The Information Resource-how and where to learn what you need to know to grow delicious organic vegetables, no matter where you live. Written for the serious gardener or small market farmer, The New Organic Grower proves that, in terms of both efficiency and profitability, smaller can be better.

By Peter Tomkins and Christopher Bird

BACK IN PRINT! This is a thoroughly researched book that will astonish you in more ways than one. It is HIGHLY educational, but you won’t find any of this valuable information in a standard textbook on soil science, gardening, or whatever.

Some of it might seem a little far-fetched or at least put a little pressure on preconceived beliefs, but the nice thing is, Tomkins & Bird have found a way to present some rather amazing concepts in a take-it-leave it sort of way, because the most assured thing about this book is that you will be inspired with the DESIRE to do SOMETHING no matter how “small” the beneficial act!

While the factual information about mankind’s stupidity and carelessness over the last few decades will break your heart all over again, this book offers many different ways for each of us as individuals to help heal the soil – the very foundation of life under our own two feet – and to help heal OURSELVES in the process.

Edited by Andrew Kimbrell

In these 370 pages we have all the information we need to convince those sitting on the fence that we must reduce our dependence on industrial agriculture. When confronted with this volume it is difficult to imagine how all those involved in the industrial agricultural chain will be able to put up an effective argument. On the contrary, it should be convincing to the thinking service organization that this is where their future profits lie and they should climb on the band wagon helping rather than hindering. For the farmer who is wavering – and probably for good reasons as his livelihood is affected – he will find in this volume the encouragement he needs; others have forged the trail and he can follow in the knowledge that the forerunners have solved the major problems.

Bravo to all those concerned with the preparation of this volume. You have done mankind a great service. It is a long tunnel down which we are travelling, but I for one can now see the light in the distance. Because of your initiative the rest of us will travel our own path with more confidence and with greater speed. At last we can hope for some sanity in our food production. If we can get this volume into the hands of enough people – people who care – then we really can change the world. If Silent Spring was the book that woke the world to the evils of indiscriminate chemical use, then this volume will go down as the one that banged home the last nail in the coffin of industrial agriculture.

Edited by Andrew Kimbrell

Fatal Harvest takes an unprecedented look at our current ecologically destructive agricultural system and offers a compelling vision for an organic and environmentally safer way of producing the food we eat.

It includes more than 250 profound and startling photographs and gathers together more than 40 essays by leading ecological thinkers including Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, David Ehrenfeld, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva, and Gary Nabhan. Its scope and photo-driven approach provide a unique and invaluable antidote to the efforts by agribusiness to obscure and disconnect us from the truth about industrialized foods.

By Edward Goldsmith

First published in 1992, The Way is Edward Goldsmith’s magnum opus. In it, he proposes that the stability and integrity of humans depend on the preservation of the balance of natural systems surrounding the individual–family, community, society, ecosystem, and the ecosphere itself. Portraying life processes and ecological thinking as holistic, Goldsmith calls for a paradigm shift away from the reductionist approach of modern science.

The basic belief in the whole was at the heart of the worldview of primal, earth-oriented societies, as manifested by the Tao of the ancient Chinese, the R’ta of Vedic India, the Asha of the Avestas, and the Sedaq of the tribal Hebrews. The Way was the path taken to maintain the critical order of the cosmos. Echoing the way of traditional cultures, Goldsmith presents an all-embracing, coherent worldview that promotes more harmonious and sustainable practices capable of satisfying real biological, social, ecological, and spiritual needs.

By Barbara Kingsolver

Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they’d only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

By Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass-half-empty follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse uses the same factors to examine why ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argues, particularly when combined with society’s response to (or disregard for) the coming disaster. Still, right from the outset of Collapse, the author makes clear that this is not a mere environmentalist’s diatribe. He begins by setting the book’s main question in the small communities of present-day Montana as they face a decline in living standards and a depletion of natural resources. Once-vital mines now leak toxins into the soil, while prion diseases infect some deer and elk and older hydroelectric dams have become decrepit. On all these issues, and particularly with the hot-button topic of logging and wildfires, Diamond writes with equanimity.

Because he’s addressing such significant issues within a vast span of time, Diamond can occasionally speak too briefly and assume too much, and at times his shorthand remarks may cause careful readers to raise an eyebrow. But in general, Diamond provides fine and well-reasoned historical examples, making the case that many times, economic and environmental concerns are one and the same. With Collapse, Diamond hopes to jog our collective memory to keep us from falling for false analogies or forgetting prior experiences, and thereby save us from potential devastations to come. While it might seem a stretch to use medieval Greenland and the Maya to convince a skeptic about the seriousness of global warming, it’s exactly this type of cross-referencing that makes Collapse so compelling.

By Bill Mollison

Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order. Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms. The philosophy behind permaculture is one of working with, rather than against, nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action; of looking at systems in all their functions rather than asking only one yield of them; and of allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions.

Food, Inc. is guaranteed to shake up our perceptions of what we eat. This powerful documentary deconstructing the corporate food industry in America was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as “more than a terrific movie—it’s an important movie.” Aided by expert commentators such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, the film poses questions such as: Where has my food come from, and who has processed it? What are the giant agribusinesses and what stake do they have in maintaining the status quo of food production and consumption? How can I feed my family healthy foods affordably.

Expanding on the film’s themes, the book Food, Inc. will answer those questions through a series of challenging essays by leading experts and thinkers. This book will encourage those inspired by the film to learn more about the issues, and act to change the world.

By Maria Rodale

Drawing on findings from leading health researchers as well as conversations with both chemical and organic farmers from coast to coast, Maria Rodale irrefutably outlines the unacceptably high cost of chemical farming on our health and our environment. She traces the genesis of chemical farming and the rise of the immense companies that profit from it, bringing to light the government’s role in allowing such practices to flourish. She further explains that modern organic farming would not only help reverse climate change by reducing harmful carbon emissions and soil depletion, but would also improve the quality of the food we eat, reduce diseases from asthma to cancer, and ensure a better quality of life in farming communities nationwide.

For every parent wondering how best to safeguard the health and safety of her children; for every environmentalist in search of a solution to the worsening crisis that afflicts our land, air, and waters; for every shopper who questions whether it is worth it to pay more for organic, Maria Rodale offers straightforward answers and a single, definitive course of action: We must demand organic now.

By Gene Logsdon

In All Flesh Is Grass: The Pleasures and Promises of Pasture Farming, Gene Logsdon explains that well-managed pastures are nutritious and palatable—virtual salads for livestock. Leafy pastures also hold the soil, increase biodiversity, and create lovely landscapes. Grass farming may be the solution for a stressed agricultural system based on an industrial model and propped up by federal subsidies. The pasture farming that Gene Logsdon practices can also produce grains, fruits, herbs, mushrooms, and salad greens for human consumption.

The book explains historically effective practices and new techniques that have blossomed in recent years for the care and sustenance of horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, and poultry on pasture. Logsdon’s warm profiles of successful grass farmers offer inspiration and ideas. His narrative is enriched by his experience as a “contrary farmer” on his own artisan-scale farm.The culmination of a lifetime’s experience, this book is vital for owners of small acreages, home food producers, horse enthusiasts, and sustainable commercial farmers.