Intentionality is fundamental to Biodynamics. The Biodynamic community is good at intentional farming but not when it comes to intentional storytelling. We are not telling our story.

A century after Rudolf Steiner gave his Agriculture Course lectures, Biodynamics remains a misunderstood discipline that has gained little traction outside the world of fine wine. The vast majority of Demeter Certified farms in the United States are wineries. Where are the farmers growing food?

Modern agricultural science realized the soil microbiome is the key to plant health. Biodynamics has always been based on this concept. Scientists are discovering that microbiology is more effective than chemicals in the long-term. The so-called “Green Revolution” increased yields in the short-term, but stripped both the soil and the food produced from it of nutritional value. Simultaneously eliminated was flavor. The goals of the Green Revolution were only realized in quantity, not quality.

The battle between quantity and quality has been an issue that has never been clearly understood with food. The volume of what is consumed satisfies but does not nourish. A new green revolution needs to balance both.

The vision of Biodynamic agriculture is to feed both body and soul. But to sustain both, we need to better to communicate the benefits of this thoughtful way of farming. This has been a major failure of the Biodynamic movement.

People need nourishment they can afford. This should be the mission of Biodynamic agriculture. That means more Biodynamic farmers. We need less Steiner and anthroposophy and more food. Spirituality is personal. Hunger is universal.

Some of the most important names in the history of Biodynamics have preached the importance of making Biodynamic farming both practical and profitable. Without achieving these goals, they knew Biodynamics would end up forgotten on the compost pile of history. Are we farmers or philosophers? The Biodynamic movement needs to decide if we want to change farming and help save the planet or if we want to be trapped in a philosophical movement from the early 1900s.

Steiner said his lectures, ‘Spiritual foundations for the renewal of agriculture” in 1924, were “suggestions” based on anthroposophy, not agriculture. The lectures were to be a starting point for the Experimental Circle of Anthroposophical Farmers. These people created Biodynamics as we know it today, not Steiner. Steiner died the year after he gave the lectures and never used the word biodynamic.

Ehrenfried Pfeiffer could rightly be considered the father of both Biodynamic and organic agriculture. He worked directly with Steiner and led the research after his death. He later migrated to Britain, where he laid the foundations for the organic agriculture movement, and then to the United States, where he met and inspired J.I. Rodale, who became a leader of organic agriculture in the United States and founded The Rodale Institute, which is a force in organic agriculture education to this day. Realizing that making all the Biodynamic preparations would be too difficult for most small farmers, he created his Pfeiffer compost starter, a Biodynamic shortcut, which contained most of the Biodynamic preparations and is still on sale today.

There is a long list of people who built the foundation of practical Biodynamics as it is practiced today. In Australia, Alex Podolinsky championed Biodynamic strategies as the “agriculture of the future” that could go beyond home gardens into large-scale commercial agriculture. In the United States, there was Alan Chadwick, who did not even use the Biodynamic preparations, and then Alan York who counseled wineries to build a solid agricultural foundation before layering on Biodynamics.

Steiner was a philosopher who gave a few lectures about agriculture. Pfeiffer, Podolinsky, Chadwick and York were farmers with a philosophy.

Steiner ended his lectures with these words,

“In these lectures, I have only been able to supply certain guidelines, of course, but I am sure that they will provide a foundation for many different experiments extending over a long period of time, and that they will lead to brilliant results if worked into your agronomical practices on an experimental basis. That should be a guideline for dealing with the material presented in this course. I am in complete agreement with the decision of the farmers participating in this course that what you have learned here should not leave this group but should serve as a basis for experimentation — and that the farmers’ association, the Agricultural Experimental Circle — will determine when the experiments have proceeded far enough for this material to be made public… What would happen — and this has already happened with other lecture cycles — is simply that other people, including farmers, would hear about it from the wrong source. Farmers that hear about it from other farmers will merely say, “Pity that they’ve lost their minds.” That is what they will say the first time, and maybe the second. But when farmers actually see something working, they then have a hard time rejecting it out of hand.”

Pity they’ve lost their minds seems to be a common sentiment with doubters of Biodynamics. But the fact is that we, the farmers, actually see something working. There is a spiritual side to Biodynamics, but Steiner thought the spiritual came first. For those practicing practical Biodynamics, farming comes first, and spirituality is personal to each farmer and their farm.

There are few things more satisfying to the soul than a farm full of life.