by Cate Montana

ANYWHERE, North America - An enormous, pale cabbage nestles in the produce section at your local grocery store. Bloated with water soluable nitrogen fertilizer, it looks picture perfect. The fertilizer responsible for its size, ammonium nitrate, is used as the oxydizing agent to make explosives. In fact, terrorist groups often build cheap “fertilizer bombs.” Ammonium nitrate is the only “food” the cabbage ever gets.

The typical Western child is forced to digest vegetables, grains, and fruits raised on this mono-chemical diet. Along with all the highly processed derivatives, this is the only “food” the kid ever gets. Fast forward to the college years. Drug and alcohol use are high. Suicides are up, and campuses across America report a dramatic increase in students seeking one-on-one counseling. And then there is Virginia Tech. Think there might be a connection?

There is an old saying, “you are what you eat.” And even the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is starting to get it – sort of. For example in 1997 the FDA banned adding certain mammalian based proteins to cattle feed after they were determined to cause Mad Cow Disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), that was first identified in the United Kingdom in the mid 1980s. Contaminated beef had, in turn, been linked with a new fatal, degenerative brain disease in humans, a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease.

Banning certain “mammalian based proteins” doesn’t sound so scary until you realize what we’re talking about is the still widespread agricultural practice of taking left over parts of cows, sheep and pigs after slaughter – intestines, bones and hooves etc. – reducing them into liquid protein and adding it as a supplement into feed that’s given to cows, sheep and pigs. Now regulated to make sure the “mammalian based proteins” only come from uncontaminated sources, we are still, in essence, forcing gentle herbivores that eat only grasses and grains to become cannibalistic carnivores. It’s enough to drive a cow insane.

The first organic food movement

In the profitable world of agribusiness, a protein’s just a protein, nitrogen is just nitrogen, and pesticides made from nerve gases left over from World War Two are an effective way to keep pests from marring the perfect fruits and vegetables we eat. In this “parts is parts” philosophy, the source of the protein and the nitrogen doesn’t matter. The main concern is what’s cheapest to produce.

You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out there’s something just plain “wrong” about feeding animal by-products to a cow. You just have to be sensitive to something beyond the “parts is parts” outlook - something called essence, which is the invariable nature of a thing. And once you start walking down the grocery store aisles looking at the essence of our food, things get scary indeed. Think about another governmental waste product now being put to good use in the food industry – plutonium.

But a growing agricultural movement called biodynamic farming is gradually helping change the world view on food production. The first organic food movement, biodynamic agriculture developed from a series of lectures given in 1924 by anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner. These lectures reframed food production by looking deeply at the essence of human beings, plants and animals, life forces, and agriculture, and showed how we can do things differently.

Raised in rural Austria, Steiner’s psyche was rooted in nature and his blood was that of peasant stock. Highly sensitive, schooled in mathematics, physics and chemistry, with a Ph.D. in philosophy, Steiner was also a noted educator and authority in theology, architecture, and medicinal plants. His lectures, which came in response to Polish farmers’ concerns about diminishing vitality in soils and fertility of seeds, stressed the importance of a self-sustaining, biologically diverse ecosystem on farms. They also focused on traditional methodologies, like crop rotation, use of animal manures, composting, and not overburdoning a farm’s ability to support its animal population.

“You want to ensure the farm organism is as self-sufficient as possible,” says Bernard Jarmen, currently executive director of the UK Biodynamic Agriculture Association. “If you have livestock, you want to feed them, as far as possible, from what you grow on the farm, and you want to fertilize the soil from fertilizer and compost material without bringing it in from the outside.

“If you build up this closed cycle you will be building a certain vitality there. The [farm] organism develops its own immune system and it’s then able to resist various external pressures and diseases. As the years go by … all the microorganisms and all the livestock and wild animals and plants and everything begin to come in tune with each other. So that’s the goal of every biodynamic farm - to become as self-contained as possible.”

Instead of looking at a farm as a business where you do things to make money, biodynamics looks at “the farm” as a living organism. Just like the human body, the farm is alive and has physical boundaries – and like the human body, every part of the farm contributes to the whole in the same way our cells contribute to the whole. And just as our bodies require certain nutrients from particular sources, so does a farm.

Having a silica deficiency doesn’t mean you can go to the beach and eat sand as a supplement. And although doctors prescribe it and nutrition and supplement companies manufacture it, calcium deficiencies aren’t necessarily assisted by taking massive doses of ground up oyster shells and sea coral either. Those sources aren’t on the regular homo sapiens diet anymore than sand. The same situation holds true for plants. Chemical farming forces plants to depend upon nitrogen for their nutrition instead of supplying normal sources for what’s needed, such as glacial rock dust and rock phosphate. As a result, vegetables have lost their vitality and almost all of their original minerals and vitamins.

Normally, the best source of usable calcium for human beings comes from healthy greens. But Popeye’s admonition to “eat your spinach” isn’t very useful anymore because of the exhausted mineral content of plants. Coincidental with the rise of chemical farming, osteoporosis is a now widespread problem, especially for women. And coral calcium is now a hot nutritional item.

Back to essence

A hundred years ago, Steiner thought the quality of food was degraded because of the growing lack of spiritual connection between agriculture and nature. To change this, he focused on more than the nuts and bolts of practical agriculture. He designed methods of attracting nature’s elementals to re-imbue life force and vital essence to food. He taught farmers the ancient art of planting in relation to the movement of the moon and the planets. He developed specific "preparations,” perhaps the most famous of which is Preparation 500: cow manure packed into a cow’s horn and buried in the ground at the automnal equinox to overwinter.

In spring a very different substance than “manure” is found, which is then dissolved in water and sprinkled on the land and on compost. Even the dissolving process is specifically designed to embue the preparation with unseen properties. The preparation is stirred x number of turns to the right, then turned back on itself and turned x number of turns to the left. And so on, back and forth, for an hour. Considered a ridulous if not superstitious practice by mainstream agronomists, and not really understood even by most biodynamic practitioners, tests do show however, that manure treated this way is higher in nutrients, including nitrogen. And that’s what can be seen on the material side of things.

“There are several ways to interpret what’s happening here,” says Jarmen. “The cow has the most advanced digestive system of any animal. And it appears that the horns are actually vital organs that [assist] its digestive processes.... For example many people with milk allergies have been able to drink cow’s milk if it comes from cows that have horns - it seems to change the protein structure in the milk. And if it does that in the milk, it also has the same effect on the manure.”

Jarmen goes on to explain the stirring process, which is supposed to enhance the preparation by taking it to another energetic level. “You’re dissolving the substance in water – but that’s the least of it really,” he says, “because you’re releasing it into rhythmic movement, and the water is then the carrier of this movement. It’s quite subtle.”

Although still relatively unknown in the west, today in India there is huge trend away from standard farming practices and a gathering allegiance to biodynamics that is anything but subtle. (See How to Save the World ) All across the country individual small farmers can be seen preparing compost piles, stirring their preparations, walking across their fields dipping brushes and rags in buckets, whisking the life-giving nutrients back onto the earth by hand. The results in the last few years have been little short of miraculous. Thousands of acres of eroded, cracked, hard pan fields that could hardly be plowed after years of intensive chemical farming are turning into fluffy, humus-rich gardens. Wildlife is returning to the hedgerows. And whole farming communities, once in debt to agribusinesses, are coming back to life.

The proof is in the pudding

Anyone who has ever bitten into a plump, blemish free tomato and been rewarded with a mouthful of tasteless, grainy mush has experienced the results of standard farming. Mono-crop vegetables are devoid of flavor precisely because they are devoid of minerals and vitamins. And, if biodynamics experts are right, because they are almost completely devoid of the mysterious essence called life force.

Perhaps this is the reason so many kids today “hate their vegetables” and prefer instead sugar based, highly refined processed foods that are artifically enhanced to taste good. And because they are empty of nutrition and life force, perhaps this is why so many Western children today are obese. They are literally starving even as they graze from pizza to macaroni, from hot dogs to Fruit Loops. They are starving even as we shove the apples, and oranges, broccoli and carrots at them, telling them “it’s good for you.”

If we are what we eat, then as a society we are running on empty… physically, morally, and spiritually. And yet biodynamics, with its focus on life forces and the spiritualization of matter, can fill the void. It takes mundane food production and satisfies more than our stomachs, because it raises it to an art that touches our essence as human beings.

“I had questions about what life meant… where are we supposed to be going,” says former educator Charles Beedy, Executive Director of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association, Inc. in Junction City, Oregon. “Biodynamics captured and gave me a “wholer” perspective on viewing the individual as well as the macro questions about the future of the earth. For me it was like it brought the whole history of the earth and the history of humanity together.”

Click here to discuss this article in our forums [1].

For more information www.biodynamics.com [2] Junction City, OR USA, (888) 516-7797; E-mail: info@biodynamics.com [3]; www.biodynamic.org.uk [4]; www.rudolfsteinerweb.com [5]