“It is not uncommon for farmers to talk about the influence their grandparents had on their farming education and their eventual success in agriculture. I am no different. But my story comes with a unique twist. My paternal grandfather, Leander Walter Townsend Coleman, was born in 1868 but was not a farmer. Unfortunately for me, the Coleman family association with farming on the family land had ended three generations before Leander’s birth. So, the grandparents I am about to acknowledge are not related to me by blood. And, although they are long deceased like Leander, they reside on my farm and I consult them on a daily basis. My farming grandparents are old books and the people who wrote them. They live on the shelves in my library and I am indebted to them. I call them grandparents because all these books were published during Leander’s lifetime. The farming techniques they convey were understood when he was born, were practiced during the early years of his life, and were as successful then as they are now…

“The important fact from my experience, after 50 years of practicing what my grandparents have taught me, is that classical organic farming works and it works far better than most people can imagine. These concepts have successfully fed mankind for 4000 years, a fact that another grandfather on my list, Franklin Hiram King, expressed so eloquently in his 1911 book, Farmers of Forty Centuries. King pointed out that the obvious answer to maintaining agricultural production in perpetuity is written on the soil of farms all around the world where the importance of feeding the soil is recognized."