Biodynamic agriculture

The first organic farming system, invented in 1924 by a clairvoyant — where the agronomy works, the cosmology is unsupported, and separating them is unusually hard.

What it is

A method of farming combining ordinary organic practice — composting, crop rotation, no synthetic fertiliser or pesticide, treating the farm as a closed system — with two additional elements that are not ordinary at all:

The preparations. Nine numbered preparations applied in minute quantities. Preparation 500 is cow manure packed into a cow's horn, buried over winter, dug up, stirred into water in a particular way and sprayed on soil. Preparation 501 is ground quartz treated the same way and sprayed on foliage. Preparations 502 to 507 are herbs — yarrow, chamomile, nettle, oak bark, dandelion, valerian — several of them fermented inside animal organs such as a stag's bladder or a cow's mesentery, then added to compost.

The calendar. Sowing, cultivating and harvesting timed to lunar and planetary positions, with crop types assigned to the classical elements: root days, leaf days, flower days and fruit days.

Where it came from

It begins at a specific event. In June 1924, at Koberwitz in Silesia, Rudolf Steiner gave eight lectures to a group of farmers worried about declining soil fertility and seed viability under the new chemical agriculture. Those lectures — the Agriculture Course — are the founding document.

Steiner was the founder of anthroposophy and the source of Waldorf education; his broader system belongs to Western esotericism and will be treated there. He derived the preparations not from trials but from what he described as direct spiritual perception of forces at work in the material world.

This chronology matters more than it usually gets credit for. Biodynamics predates the organic movement. Albert Howard's work on composting and Lady Eve Balfour's The Living Soil came later; the Soil Association was founded in 1946. The Demeter certification, established in 1928, is the oldest ecological farming certification in existence. Whatever one makes of the cosmology, the practical programme — feed the soil, close the loop, stop importing chemistry — was articulated first here.

How it is practised

The farm is managed as a single organism with its own livestock, fodder and manure. Preparations are made on the farm, or bought, and applied on a schedule. The stirring of 500 and 501 is specified: an hour, alternating direction to create and collapse a vortex. Field operations follow a calendar, most influentially the one developed by Maria Thun from the 1960s.

It is unusually prominent in wine. A substantial number of respected estates in Burgundy, Alsace, the Loire and increasingly Australia farm biodynamically, and several are among the most admired producers in their regions.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the farming works, and that this is well documented. The Swiss DOK trial, running since 1978 and comparing biodynamic, organic and conventional systems on the same site, has found that the biodynamic and organic plots show greater soil biological activity, more microbial biomass, better soil structure and more earthworms than conventional, with somewhat lower yields.

We can say that result does not validate the preparations, and the trial cannot separate them. Biodynamic plots differ from conventional in composting, rotation, livestock integration and the absence of synthetic inputs — all of which are sufficient to explain the soil results. Studies designed to isolate the preparations, comparing organic management with and without them, generally find little or no effect attributable to the preparations themselves.

We can say the lunar planting calendar has been tested and has not performed. Controlled sowing trials do not find the predicted differences between root, leaf, flower and fruit days.

We can say the cosmology has no support. There is no evidence for cosmic forces concentrated in a buried horn, and no proposed mechanism compatible with what is known about soil chemistry. Quantities are so small that a chemical explanation is implausible on its face — the preparations are applied at grams per hectare.

We should also record, neutrally, that Steiner's wider writings contain a hierarchy of races and statements about human development that are straightforwardly racist, and that anthroposophical organisations have had to reckon with this publicly. It is not incidental to his system and it should not be omitted from a description of him, even in an agricultural context.

We cannot say biodynamic farmers are producing worse wine or worse soil, because they are demonstrably not. What can be said is that the results appear to come from the attention and the organic practice rather than from the horns — and that a system requiring you to walk your land constantly, observe closely, keep livestock, make your own compost and time your work carefully would be expected to produce good farming whatever story it told about why.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading