With thanks to the translator Reinhard Rosch and to the Celestial Planting Calendar here is the nuts and bolts of the work Of Georg Wilhelm Schmidt's inspiring work on seed regeneration. GWS was an inspiration to Enzo Nastati who also wrote about seed regeneration and was someone I learned from in the late 1980's.
Methods of seed Generation
Translated from the German Original by Reinhard Rosch March 2015
INTRODUCTION
This report is a summary of the work of G.W. Schmidt in the field of seed regeneration. G.W. Schmidt
has worked for many years on the development of methods for breeding seed material for cereal crops.
His work builds on the research of his father, Martin Schmidt, which was done between the years 1945
and 1964. Martin Schmidt, in turn, received his inspiration from the "Lectures on Agriculture"
(Landwirtschaftlicher Kurs) given by Rudolf Steiner.
G.W. Schmidt’s strategy for generating cereal seed material is based on making targeted use of the
etheric forces as outlined by Rudolf Steiner.
Anthroposophy posits that, for healthy growth, plants need not only the conventional media such as
soil, light, water, nutrients and a favourable climate, but also some finer emanations, the so-called
etheric formative forces. Steiner describes the four etheric forces, namely Life ether, Chemical ether,
Light ether and Warmth ether; these closely relate to the four elements Earth, Water, Air and Fire.
The correlation and effects of the etheric formative forces presented here are based on work done by
Steiner, Wachsmuth (1965) and Hagemann (1979, 1973). The effects of the etheric formative forces in
the area of plant cultivation is presented in this paper in the form of tables and diagrams. The authors
are aware that this form of presentation is somewhat narrowly structured; however, for didactic
development of the individual etheric spheres of influence, such a rigid structure is needed to better
understand the subject matter. For continued research in the field of etheric formative forces, it will
nevertheless be necessary to loosen this rigidity and introduce some mobility; after all, in a natural
growing environment here on Earth, the etheric forces are continuously mingling and interpenetrating.
In reality, we never deal with the effect of only one etheric force in isolation. In the continuation of this
research and practice involving the etheric forces, there may arise the need to move beyond the here
presented structure and assignments; just as in the research presented here, the test results made it
necessary to rework the assignment of the planetary effects. For example, Steiner categorized the
planets in his "Lectures on Agriculture" (Landwirtschaftlicher Kurs) into inner and outer planets with
respect to the Sun’s ecliptic. However, in the course of G.W. Schmidt’s research, it became necessary to
move from a twofold to a threefold scheme to account for all the planetary effects. The planetary map
(Figure 4) gives some important clues with regard to this matter.
A summary of the plant breeding work by Martin Schmidt, Georg Schmidt’s father, has appeared under
the “Barsinghaeuser Berichte,” Folio No.50. This work is basically a literature survey and is sourced
mainly from reports authored by G.W. Schmidt and E. Erdmenger (1971) as well as by E.v.
Wistinghausen (1967). The latter works show evaluation and statistics of test results in the plant
breeding research undertaken by these three authors.