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Yale’s Timothy Dwight common room is packed. The room quiets down, and a couple hundred Ivy affiliates surrender their ears … to a farmer.

The man, the farmer, the legend, is Eliot Coleman, educator, advocate of Four Seasons Farming (a year-round farming philosophy of his own creation), and author of several seminal books on organic farming. For nearly 40 years, Coleman has championed the organic farming cause, testing his methods on one and a half acres of the very successful Four Seasons Farm, on his property in Maine.

 “Of course organic farming can feed the world,” Coleman said. The audience was dumbstruck.

Coleman began by explaining that it was his taste for adventure that got him into farming. In his mid-twenties, Coleman was hiking, trekking, and climbing mountains, hauling a 90-pound bag of gear, venturing into nature for three or four weeks at a time: “It was a heck of a lot harder than farming,” he said. Coleman defines farming as a socially responsible adventure; the best adventure he has had so far, with the decades of dedication to the cause a hard-hitting testament to that fact.

In addition to farming and adventure, Coleman loves reading-a combination that birthed the success of his farming practice. Coleman briefed us on his story: he was a “kid from New Jersey” who started out at Williams College as a geology major, ending up with a master’s in Spanish literature, with absolutely no background in agriculture. Apart from having a sense of adventure, and paying attention to the systems already present in nature (a skill that he learned while hiking and mountain-climbing), Coleman got started in agriculture by reading old gardening books from the 1800s, to learn how people grew crops before pesticides and fertilizer. “I’m a Jeffersonian farmer,” Coleman said, “I read things.” What he learned, apparently, is alarmingly simple: You just have to grow them correctly.

Coleman explained that he utilizes a system of crop rotations based on regular soil amendments, and he uses the presence of pests to gauge if he is growing correctly: “Pests are the best Professors of Agriculture,” he said. He began to wax lyrical about nature, the force that is his second love (after his longtime wife, Barbara Damrosch, a renowned horticulturalist and author, who was seated in the front row).