"Organic farming is a very knowledge-intensive farming system...as such, farmers must learn to manage an entire ecosystem geared to producing food—controlling pests through biological means, using the waste from animals to fertilize fields and even growing one crop amidst another."

The key to biodynamic farming lies in education. And that is where we begin our journey.  Much like any Step program, we learn from the approach and adapt it to our environment.
In follow up posts, I will expand on our 7-step approach to farming that lays the foundational principles of biodynamic farming and the spirituality that drives it from birth to awareness and [long-term] sustainability.

Read on for more. Today I will leave you with a captivating video of someone who has found a balance in a very unlikely place to find her place in the ecosystem (click here if your device does not show the video below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SNP3QNb5Mx0#!

Today, we can learn many things from the garden, things we desperately need to know. It is an unequaled educational and therapeutic tool, personally and for schools, clinics, and other institutions. The garden can be a touchstone in urban life. Community gardens are flourishing throughout the country. The interest in landscaping is much more acute that even a few years ago. Whatever the garden gives us in food, it provides much more in spiritual, aesthetic, educational, and other ways.

What about the farm? A prime task of the farm is social! We ask less than 1% of our population to take responsibility for most of the land that is not residential—an unequal and unfair situation at best. In many places people are searching for new social relationships to our farmers. Farming teaches us about the limits to our scientific and economic thought processes. It is simply not possible to farm successfully without chemicals without changing one’s consciousness from an emphasis on discrete, even microscopic chemical changes, and from a purely economic view, to a much more holistic outlook.

Using such aids as Rudolf Steiner’s work, we are called upon, not to go back to an idealized past which was far from ideal, but to forge an new approach to agriculture which cannot be divorced from a new approach to human relationships. Farming is a microcosm in which we can see clearly the changes that have to occur. Each farmer who chooses to participate in the new farming has not only to begin to develop a new “peasants’ philosophy,” but a new society around the farm. While the garden can teach us many things,  the farm is most suited to be the school for our future. Indeed, one way to look at what a farm can be is Alan York’s statement that a farmer tries to create the equinoxial conditions of a garden on a large scale. 

It is truly, as Alan Chadwick would say, “an enterprise of enormous proportions.”