Too much work but I envy his spinach

The Winter Harvest Handbook:

Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses

by Eliot Coleman

Way too technical for me, but required reading for any small farmer even if he doesn't plan to build moveable greenhouses.  (I'd love one!)  It's a textbook of greenhouse farming.  But it had a bit of information for non-greenhouse, non-winter producers too.

A very small chapter at the end speaks less of the how-to of organic farming and more of the why-do. And it reminds us of this:

The reason for this still very active attempt to villainize organic farming is that our success scares the hell out of the other side. Just like the fear of Nature that the merchandisers and scientists have worked so hard to create in farmers in order to make purchased chemical products and reductionist science seem indispensable, so has our success with organic farming created in the scientists and merchandisers a terrible fear--a fear of their own redundancy; a fear that all farmers will realize other solutions are possible; a fear that agriculture will learn the truth. Organic farmers have succeeded in producing a bounty of food through the simple means of working in harmony with natural processes, without any help from the scientists and the merchandisers.

Sorry, that's a horrid quote. His writing style is much better in other parts of the book.  But it's a reminder of a couple of obvious facts we tend to forget:

Human beings have been farming and keeping themselves fed for about 10,000 years.

For 9950 years of that time, he didn't have chemical fertilizers. Or pesticides. Or herbicides.

Farmers have been saving their own seed and improving crop varieties themselves, very successfully, without scientists.

And finally, beware when the person selling you something tells you that you have to buy his product because "if you don't, you'll fail."  If you don't buy his product, exactly who is it who'll be failing?