Manfred Klett
This title might well seem to exaggerate the importance of agriculture. After all, does it not appear to be in a miserable state and, in terms of economics, as a secondary issue or simply a nuisance, absorbing as it does increasing amounts of subsides to the detriment of our natural environment? This is true, but is this not the clearest indication that farming as a cultural task has finally died, and does not this death present opportunities that we can as yet scarcely imagine? The demise of agriculture in the Christian West was complete by the beginning of the sixties. Ever since it has been a victim of industry ending up in this miserable state carrying out what science, technology, politics and the world market force it to do.
The fate of the threefold social order and the death of agriculture
It is worthwhile recalling the years from 1917 to 1922, when Rudolf Steiner boldly tried to cultivate a consciousness of and to establish the threefold social order in Central Europe in the chaotic years following the first World War. He looked for support among the working classes, the uprooted people who had lost their traditional background in the course of the nineteenth century and whose urgent questions about their future lives remained unanswered.
They were the true representatives of the "social question". In those days after World War I, farmers still made up 40% of the working population (today the figure is 3%), and preserved their traditional way of life. The church was still alive in most villages, the individual still unquestionably served the community. In spite of the great efforts and the deep devotion which were invested by so many people to bring the threefold social order into being, one has to acknowledge that the endeavour failed. Aside from the hyper-inflation of the 1920s, there was one overriding reason: our consciousness was not up to it.
Has this changed at all since then? For decades valuable works on the social question have been published, and some attempts have been made to put them into practice. But somehow they have remained incomplete, they have not been strong enough to radiate into and to restructure social life. One basic element that could not be taken hold of was the economic life, and today's global economy is completely beyond control.
Meanwhile, unnoticed in a hidden, neglected niche of social life as it were, the death of agriculture took place. With it went any semblance of an ideal world one could withdraw to. The social question now faces the environmental question. Agriculture is no longer a matter of inheritance, nor can it be seen as the bearer of the folk soul. Its death means that it has been released from the age of the intellectual soul and now needs to be reborn into the age of the consciousness soul. Its rebirth means biodynamic farming.
Death reveals what life conceals. In face of the ruins left by industrialisation - manipulative applied science, strangling legislation, short-term economics - we are forced to grasp the idea of agriculture anew and in full consciousness. In doing so and in putting it into practice we most surprisingly find that it contains two aspects of social threefoldness which relate to one another, like a seed containing two cotyledons.
The essence of biodynamic farming in relation to man
What is the essence of biodynamic farming, which penetrates as deeply into nature as it does into social life in an evolutionary process leading far into the future? Agriculture is like a skin, where social life meets the life of the Earth and where they interpenetrate (see sketch). Each farm may be seen as a cell of this skin which itself is revealed in the cultivated landscape.
If we now put ourselves in the position of somebody who has grown up in London or in eastern Europe beyond the former iron curtain and we assume the person concerned has internalised the spiritual concept of biodynamic farming and wants to put it into practice, we face the problem of creating something out of nothing. Where does he get the land or the capital from? Where are the like-minded people to help form a collaborative community? He has nothing but the spiritual concept of Biodynamics in mind, yet it is strong enough to move mountains. This idea as a world in itself is contained in the following words by Rudolf Steiner: "Now a farm actually fulfils its being in the best sense of the word when it can be conceived of as a kind of individuality, a real self-contained individuality". (This is an attempt at literal translation; the English and American editions of the Agricultural Course each quote a slightly different version.) Spiritual research tells us that biodynamic farming is not primarily an ecological matter but has to do with a right understanding of the human being. We are invited to learn to know ourselves as a microcosm, as an individuality which expresses itself in the threefoldness of our body. Study of the morphology and function of the human body reveals three autonomous systems which house the soul spirit with its three soul faculties.
Observing the head, it is a concentration of the nerve-sense-system. As a sphere it rests quietly on the shoulders. The skull is of crystalline bony substance enveloping the brain, which swims in the cerebral fluid. The brain substance - the foundation for our thinking - continuously tends to decay and needs a continuous flow of nourishment from the blood. In our head everything is closer to death than to life.
Looking at our limbs and our metabolism, we encounter a system which is the polar opposite. The limbs radiate into the world. Everything is alive and in a state of conscious or unconscious movement, an expression of our will.
As an independent realm and yet mediating between the two poles, we find the rhythmic or circulatory system in the breathing lungs and the beating heart. These rhythmic organs are sheltered by the thorax, which is closed towards the head, half open in its own sphere by the sequence of the ribs and fully open towards the stomach, separated only by the diaphragm. In this realm our feeling manifests.
These three systems interrelate and form the human body as a "self-contained individuality". It is a microcosm, comprising as an image the wholeness of the macrocosm. In observing ourselves we can find what is needed to educate and develop ourselves and, hence, what is needed to educate and develop the Earth into the future. Referring to his Agricultural Course, Rudolf Steiner observes: "Everywhere the starting point is the study of man, man will be the foundation".
The threefoldness of the farm individuality
But how do we find our way from man to nature? The answer to this question leads to a rebirth of agriculture. Imagine standing in a field on a midsummer day, observing the ripening rye. The soil is hard and dry. Invisibly, the roots submerge into the darkness of the solid earth, oriented towards the centre of the Earth, splitting off into the tiny root hairs, almost fusing with the crystalline minerals, enhancing the process of weathering and sensing the salty substances that are dissolved and thus absorbing them. Beneath our feet, reaching into the far depths of the Earth, rests the mineral world, crystalline, motionless, solid, progressively decaying, everything closer to death than to life, and like silica a reflector and earthly sense organ of the formative forces of the distant heavens. The geological foundation below our feet is the head pole of the agricultural individuality.
Above the soil, our view rests upon an abundance of ever changing phenomena. The wind sends silver waves rippling over the rye field.
After a spell of bright sunshine, a thunderstorm pours heavy showers over the land, nothing stays the same for even a moment. In all weathers everything is alive and in motion. We look into and live in the belly, the metabolic pole of this individuality, which, compared with a human being, stands upright on its head, linking Earth and Sun.
Where these two poles meet and interact, a thin inconspicuous skinlike laver manifests: the soil. Rudolf Steiner calls it the diaphragm of the agricultural individuality. From this skin, all plant life shoots up year after year, materialising as an image this invisible vertical axis of directive forces between earth and sun. The term "diaphragm" is well chosen to characterise the soil. Both neither breathe nor pulsate by themselves. They merely react to the forces from above and beneath. But as the diaphragm has the potential actively to enhance the breathing of the lungs, the soil is able actively to maintain and provide fertility.
Thus the task of a reborn agriculture is to educate and develop this capacity and to enliven the solid earth which thus becomes an ever more independent and autonomous realm between the two poles of the heights and the depths.
All agricultural work must serve this task. The most effective educational means "to fulfil the being of the farm individuality" are the different fertilisers deriving from plant (humus), animal (manure) and man (biodynamic preparations).
Humus and manure are fertilisers nature provides. They enliven the soil in the horizontal dimension in a more universal sense. The biodynamic preparations, however, are the result of a technology deriving from spiritual research. They come about through a free human deed and by devotion to their spiritual origin. They are new substances, introduce individualising forces into nature and thus work vertically, developing and strengthening the threefoldness. The horn-manure preparation for example relates to the plant root, a
"head fertiliser"; the horn-silica preparation is a fertiliser of the metabolism relating to plant growth; while the compost preparations enliven the soil as such, strengthening its mediating function.
A self-contained farm involves building a body, an organism, in the horizontal for this vertically oriented individuality. In linking together the mineral, plant and animal kingdom on a higher stage, it should provide all the means not only to sustain soil fertility, but to transform and enliven earthly matter.
Biodynamic farming extending into social life
- The task of biodynamic farming points to a future evolution of the Earth: it is nothing less than planting into nature and the work of the past the idea of development. Can this tremendous task ever be performed by those tragic few who are left to steer machines for the sake of maximising turnover, or by those happy few who have grasped the idea of biodynamic farming?
It is impossible. It was possible as long as social welfare was still inherent in agriculture. But through its death it has become part of the general social scene of present civilisation.
It is for this reason that biodynamic farming, being the answer to the environmental question, offers a tremendous creative power to help to answer the social question. It expands from year to year beyond the limits of the farm, deeper into the life of the civilisation around it. This often means a double burden for the people on the farms, and in many places the social bridge-building is more challenging than the biodynamic work itself. It is symptomatic of the dependence upon the social life around that because of its ever growing complexity there is no area left where the biodynamic farmer or gardener can solve his problems alone. He is dependent for better or for worse at all levels on the energy and consciousness, the capacities and the collaboration of people who are not directly involved in agriculture. On the other hand it is equally symptomatic that biodynamic farming offers the task of taking responsibility for the Earth which is beneficial to the whole of society.
Since the final industrialisation of agriculture in the sixties, a new awareness of the environment has arisen in society. But in general, it has no real goal. The objective is nature conservancy and the avoidance of further destruction.
As soon as people come into contact with the broader vision of biodynamic farming, they realise that there is something as yet unknown which calls for an inner change, the commitment to turn from passive observation to the active shaping of social processes. What is the objective of this creative shaping? It is again a threefold one, the second cotyledon in the one seed capsule.
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Let us imagine a biodynamic farmer's family or rather a collaborating community of farmers. They do the work, plough the field, feed the cows, care for the seed, make the preparations, plant hedges and everything else. They are dealing with a universe, condensed into a farm organism. It affords a tremendous amount of knowledge, not academic, but spiritual knowledge which rationally penetrates every detail of the physical, living and intellectual realm, and which really is capable of overcoming the abyss between ourselves and the spiritual reality which remains hidden from our senses. In biodynamic farming, we encounter the germ for a renewal of spiritual life altogether. But this is now not one of further emancipation from nature, by which we achieved freedom and self-consciousness. That we have already achieved. Now is the time to take free initiative and responsibility to support the active farmers with insights and individual abilities. If we imagine the concept of the farm individuality becoming alive in ever more people's minds, they would joyfully contribute their ideas and put their abilities at the farm's service. This is already happening in many places. Moreover this increasingly enables the biodynamic farmer to answer the questions of an ignorant but interested public out of his own actual experience. The content of the Agricultural Course has so far proved difficult to transmit in the form of ideas. Thus circles of friends are increasingly forming around the farms; communities that share initiative, responsibility and skills. It is not only the people on the farms who find themselves with an educational task of a new sort, but the whole farm itself becomes an open centre for learning. A new and altruistic spiritual life - one of active initiative - is igniting around biodynamic farms. When people from outside take on shared responsibility for the farm, consciousness expands over this bit of the earth, and interest awakens from person to person, something that can ripen to morally effective conviction.
There are members of such social support groups who might even join in the practical work, caring for the hedges, the birds, and offering whatever help is needed. Others are more inclined to participate in farm research and training and in study work with the farmers or in arranging seasonal celebrations. Yet the main emphasis should be put on the working with the preparations. All free initiative should focus on this future task to enliven the head function of the farm individuality.
It is inherent in the spiritual dimension of biodynamic farming that research and training finds its appropriate place within the organism of the farm individuality. The practical work can not be done without a research attitude. The farmer needs help in developing this. Unlimited questions are waiting to be worked on, and everybody is invited to offer his skills. The complementary gesture is a growing willingness to collaborate between the biodynamic farmers and research institutes at universities.
Another great enrichment, but also a challenge from the spiritual cultural point of view, is collaboration with people from other fields of work.
Biodynamic farms become crystallisation points, local centres, inspiring other activities such as baking, cheese making, running a farm-shop, making handicrafts, or providing curative education, social therapy or even just normal schooling. When this is the case, a new social awareness can spread. Social arrangements become more flexible and innovative.
The social environment starts to correspond to the farm or farms, and new spiritual life germinates and unites people not merely out of sympathy but through spiritual interest. On the social front, free initiative, ideas and skills start to be shared. The metabolic pole of the social organism, the cultural spiritual sphere, is stirred up, re-enlivened and intensified, while establishing forms of agriculture by entrepreneurial means that would take shape from these enlivened ideas. The metabolic pole of the social organism nourishes the head pole of the farm individuality.
Shaping social life in the economic sphere
Let us now imagine the farmer who starts to harvest the rye or whatever crops have ripened. The greater the variety of cultivated crops and animal husbandry, the healthier and more self-contained the farm organism. Both metabolic poles, the spiritual life of the social organism and the spiritual life of the farm individuality, bring forth a spiritual output on different levels. On the one side, initiative, skills, ideas; on the other fruit formation. On the social side there is a need for the ripened fruit. The latter is transformed into a product once it leaves the farm organism and enters economic life. When it passes the threshold, its objective value, which derives from the natural conditions of its farm origin, is also transformed into an economic value. Both values should ideally be comparable, though at present they are far apart.
It is at the threshold between the metabolic area of the farm and the economic life that the prime productivity occurs, the creation of value from which all economics, also industrial goods, should take their measure. The economic life consists of production, distribution and consumption. These three functions are closely linked. From the point of view of quality, freshness, costs of transport and so on, the distance from the farm to the consumer should be as short as possible.
Thus the regional market is most appropriate for biodynamic agriculture - exactly the opposite of what is currently described as an agricultural world market.
Biodynamic prime production provides a unique opportunity to build up local markets on an associative basis. Contrary to current economic behaviour in general, measures can be taken there to exclude egoism and make agriculture the needle on the scale where a new form of shared welfare is emerging. And in fact we see on all sides quiet attempts at bridge building to neighbouring farms, to the processors, distributors and consumers. This is reflected in agreements as to what is planted to cover actual needs, in the founding of and co-operating with decentralised processing enterprises on or near the farms. In distribution, the same route of decentralisation is followed. The spectrum stretches from the farm shop with special forms of direct purchase as in "community supported gardening or agriculture" - widely developed in the US - and vegetable crate-subscription systems via the regional distributors on to wholesalers.
The incipient regional market shows every sign of becoming the starting point for economic associations. In forming such markets, the ambivalent mass of consumers can be educated into becoming dependable economic partners.
An increasing number of them can be won over as active co-shapers of the economic process. Thus consumer egotism can be transformed into genuine interest in the individual economic partner and in particular in the goals of biodynamic farming.
Starting out from agriculture, the associative principle can be exercised here and now in eradicating competition and in practising collaboration in the sense of brotherhood.
Associations can only grow up where strict account is taken of the given state of consciousness among their partners, in direct face to face meetings, in immediate contact with the economic facts and in the schooling of practical thinking on the basis of these facts. Symptoms of our time indicate that from now on, economic associations are growing and must grow out of the "regionality" of agriculture. Biodynamic farming is called upon by the spirit of the age to moderate the excesses of economics and to transform present economic thinking.
The task of such associations is clearly delineated in forming "round tables", where the economic partners of a region meet and discuss how to satisfy the region's needs, how to arrive at a "just price" and what investments or debt-settlements are needed. Thus the associations deriving from biodynamic farming serve the social organism as its organ of perception and thinking. It generates true social judgements, community judgements. It can make adjustments at root level before abuses appear, that can then only be checked by abstract laws and the controls that follow. If the economic life is to prosper in a human way, it must be composed of interrelating associations which may start from agriculture and eventually seek connections to industry. If we consider the function of economic associations, we can understand that economic life is the head of the social organism, the counter-pole to spiritual life.
Shaping social life in the rights sphere
We have now polarised the spiritual life and economic life of the social organism against the background of the farm individuality. In the latter, we discovered a mediating realm, the soil, which comes to life when we fertilise it. In the social organism, the sphere of rights is the mediating barren or fertile realm which corresponds to the barren or fertile soil. This also needs to be fertilised. This happens when we raise the relation between the life of rights and the life of the developing "diaphragm" to consciousness. We might then feel that there is an unresolved question about ownership. If we deal with this question, we might eventually achieve the capacity to be able to separate ourselves with our karma from the stream of heredity, to become independent of any attachment to property. Thus we establish the possibility of entering into new forms of collaboration with others as equals among equals. As these relationships arise, the rights life receives further fructification from the agricultural individuality by the creation of a new community karma which frees itself from all bondage to a territory, race or nation.
The main challenge to build this new community karma is to overcome the defined rights that limit the future. Not least because relations between people can remain anonymous. What is urgently needed - and this is something which ought to be fertilised by free initiatives from above and by community judgements of real brotherhood from below - is rights based on trust and on the feeling of justice that arise among people like plants rise from the soil. Trust as a substance of rights emerges when a group of people is constantly at work, testing, maintaining and developing the sense of rights in their practical application. The right to use the farm land and working capital or, rather, the right to operate the "farm individuality" - without payment of rent - is a touchstone for whether a legal community is strong enough to rely on trust. The right to own and run a farm is normally handed over by inheritance, purchase or lease. Here the old notions of rights prevail. If we take seriously the idea that the land, or better still the whole of the farm individuality, cannot be a commodity, i.e. not to be purchased or sold, then it is subject only to an autonomous rights relationship. The right of ownership then dissolves into a body of persons extending beyond the bounds of the farm. They act in the sphere of spiritual life and will out of shared responsibility guard the right and pass it on to a new group of farmers when the time has come.
In recent decades, many attempts have been made to find new legal forms for the use of land and farm capital based on trust. They are to be found in farming communities and in "community supported farming and gardening" enterprises. Such forms in the rights sphere are based on declarations of intent that are open to the future, not fixed and tied to paragraphs. If we enter this open legal framework, rights develop in relationship to individual karma and the karma of the collaborating community. These legal forms for "practical rights" growing out of life have no place, no recognition within official legal systems. But in order to exist at all, such a rights life has to be adjusted to existing legal norms. As a rule, this takes the form of a foundation, charitable trust or civil association.
If we accept the challenge of reason and set off on the path of a "rightless sphere", that is to practise rights based on trust, then the social realm becomes full of creative possibilities for change. The operation of the farm individuality lies fully in the hands of the groups of farmers.
As soon as they end their work, the right to dispose of the farm dissolves into a community which cares for the transition, replacing heredity, lease and purchase or sale.
There is another impact of biodynamic farming on the development of a living sense of rights in the social environment. It is a question of income and of how to integrate as many co-workers, apprentices and practitioners as are necessary to fully establish the farm individuality. How little this can be the concern of the individual farmer is shown in its negative aspect on the one hand by the subsidies that are poured into agriculture. On the other hand there are not sufficient means to finance urgently needed co-workers, while unemployment abounds. Direct payments are no solution to ensure income and compensate for prices that fall to world market levels. They are far from being able to finance the necessary increase in hands that must be devoted to biodynamic farming. The securing of the income can be achieved by setting prices in the economic associations in accordance with the costs from one harvest to the next.
Biodynamic farming is ready to solve the problem of unemployment. Unemployment means that there is excessive industrial activity and Now it could swing back. A renewal of education, the rights life and economic life is dependent on people finding their way back into agriculture where they are urgently needed.
The farmer between two threefold entities
If we imagine ourselves in the midst of our soul-being, standing on the border line between the life of the Earth and social life, our soul forces reach out into the inner configuration of nature and into the intimacies of social life.
In each of these realms they establish in a narrower or wider context a threefolded unity: the agricultural individuality and the social organism. Both are a reflection and at the same time an expansion of our individual being and the being of a collaborating community. On both sides, thinking and willing are inverted. The spirit-will in the social sphere transforms earthly matter in order to bring about a renewed working of cosmic thought in nature. What spirit engenders in nature by forming fruits becomes the basis for holistic social thinking in the economic sphere, the "head" of the social organism. This thinking must, in exercising "common sense", see to it that everybody's needs are met. Through our feeling we weave together the sphere of rights in which karma shapes itself with the Earth's mediating realm, the soil-diaphragm. It is from this that our body takes the forces for living out our karma, and it is into this that the outcome of karma is inscribed.
Thus from the viewpoint we have taken here, the agricultural individuality and the social organism are two sides of the same coin. The one can neither exist nor develop without the other.insufficient agricultural activity. The pendulum has swung from agriculture to industry in the past.