Page 19 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 2 Winter 2013

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Eliot Coleman ’57
TRANSFORMING MAINE INTO GEORGIA
liot Coleman has been bounding out of bed since
he made the decision to go into farming more than
40 years ago. He was teaching college Spanish when
he read a book about small farming that piqued his
adventure-meter. After renting a piece of land and
farming it for two years, he bought 40 wooded acres,
clearing two by hand.
“Maybe I’m strange, but I’ve always liked hard work
and physical endeavors,” he says. “There are always dif-
ficulties, just as there are if you want to climb a mountain.
Farming is a lot easier than climbing with 70 pounds on
your back. I don’t consider it work.”
Today those two acres he cleared decades ago (plus 12
more since) compose Four Season Farm (www.foursea-
sonfarm.com), an experimental market garden in Harbor-
side, Maine, that Coleman likens to paradise. He owns
and operates the farm with his wife, Barbara Damrosch.
Both Coleman and Damrosch are published authors, and
Four Season Farm has become a nationally recognized
model of small-scale sustainable agriculture. Coleman
speaks with pride about the farm’s innovative plastic-
covered, unheated greenhouses, each with a second layer
of plastic inside, which allows Coleman to grow year
round. “We’ve transformed Maine into Georgia,” he says.
“It’s becoming a popular way of raising winter food with
no energy.” Severine Von Tsarchner Fleming ’00, another
Paulie farmer, says Coleman’s practices are widely referred
to as the “Eliot Coleman method.”
“The farmers I know are the smartest, most inventive
people I’ve ever come across,” Coleman says, recalling
missed having a daily connection to nature. At the time
of their marriage, he and his wife Jocelyn Apicello made
it their top priority to figure out how to construct a life-
style that would make them happy. They dubbed their post-
nuptials “honey-moving,” and, shortly after getting hitched,
found themselves in the town of El Hoyo in Patagonian
Argentina, living hand to mouth on a small plot of land
owned by a poor farming family. For the next 18 months,
they took up residence in a cottage on the farm, learning
everything possible about small-scale, sustainable farming.
“We ate the vegetables we farmed,” Angell says.
They have applied the knowledge from their appren-
ticeship in rural Argentina to Longhaul Farm, their small
plot in the rocky terrain of Garrison, where they farm
vegetables, herbs, and flowers (longhauling.blogspot
.com). They have chickens too – half for eggs and half for
slaughter. As in Argentina, they do not go far to fill their
larder. “We preserve a ton of things,” Angell says, describ-
ing an old-fashioned storeroom, which they live off during
the cold winter months.
“We didn’t have the money to invest in a tractor,” Angell
says, recalling the farm’s modest start. Instead, the two of
them employed a method known as double digging, which
entails digging the earth two feet straight down so that
crops can be planted four times closer to one another
than they would be in the more conventional practice. “It
was the hardest six months of our lives,” Angell recalls.
“But our guiding philosophy has always been, ‘How can
we do more with less?’”
Six months into the double digging and well shy of what
they needed to get done to prepare for their community-
supported agriculture program (CSA) of 25 families, a friend
came in with a tractor to till and plough. “We’re not totally
dogmatic about our approach,” Angell says, a note of levity
creeping into his voice, as it does later in the conversa-
tion when he remarks that every farmer needs a good
beer or glass of wine after a long day. “Farming,” he says,
“is a physical, intellectual, and emotional challenge.”
Today Jason and Jocelyn are seeing a lot of younger
farmers who are interested in their model, which includes
doing most everything with their hands. “I am living a
life where I’m very happy and feel very productive,” he
says. “Everything I do makes me feel satisfied. I never
have that dread of getting up. No Monday blues. No
living for the weekend.”
E
BARBARA DAMROSCH
PHOTOS BY ROB CARDILLO AND BARBARA DAMROSCH