Farm & Garden Update: 100 Years of Biodynamics

One Hundred Years ago, in the final years before Rudolf Steiner’s death, he gave some of his most significant and enduring lecture series’, including the Agricultural Course. From his indications in this course surged forward a new method of agriculture, firmly rooted in the essential nature of plants, animals, soil, and spirit, a contrast to the increasingly technologically driven methods arising at the time. This impulse came to North America, with Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, one of a small group tasked with developing these agricultural methods. Pfeiffer came to a small town in New York, an easy distance from the city, called Spring Valley, now known as Chestnut Ridge, where a small farm had begun. Here, at Threefold Farm, he provided summer conferences. For the first time on this continent, Biodynamic Agriculture was practiced and biodynamic research was carried forward, right here on our school campus. These methods have continued to be practiced in the care and cultivation of the land here, and our students are now active participants in this work.

Both the Medicinal Garden and the OSS North Farm were some of the original garden areas on campus, whose footprints and agricultural work our school re-established in recent years. The forests, gardens, and pastures we work in traverse every day, have had farmers oversee its use and care with biodynamic principles and insights. Decades of building soil, layer after layer, with compost and crop rotations, biodynamic preparations, and a planting cycle attuned to the planetary movement, continue to imbue the land with health and generating forces. The impulse for a paradigm shift in viewing the land as a spiritual being and not just an ends to a means, to care, protect, and preserve it with reverence rather than greed, is no less needed now than it was 100 years ago. Biodynamics, like Waldorf Education, came about so we could prepare for the future, to bring healing to the traumas Steiner saw coming to our earth and our humanity. At Otto Specht, we are working together with Endeavor21+ to build and maintain the Medicinal Garden as a community space. This garden, which has flourished and faltered in recent years, was one of two kitchen gardens when Mac Mead, renowned biodynamic educator who continues to help operate Threefold Community Farm and runs a yearly biodynamic course, first came to the community. OSS North continues to develop into a thriving micro-farm, with a small orchard added where potatoes were grown this year between the young trees. Students proudly returned home with potatoes and other goods, snacked on husk cherries, and had the benefit of participating in nearly a full year’s cycle of growing, especially those who joined for summer school.  Barley, oats, and peas have now been sown as this year’s cover crop and students will begin to transition into the greenhouse work where each class will have its own specific focus.

In our school and in our community, we are manifesting those impulses generated a century ago. We are, here and now, in this current time, on this significant piece of land, doing this important and meaningful work. It remains medicine and work not just for now but for the future, and watching the students connect and actively engage in the rhythms of the land and the season, makes me happy and hopeful.