sure how they found us in the first place. (As a CSA, our
clients signed up at the beginning of the season and we
picked and dropped off produce twice a week in town.)
This shared experience with other Virginia growers
was not uncommon. In fact, it was acknowledged among
a few of us that the unnerving and escalating consumer
demand couldn’t really be about that perfect slicing
heirloom tomato. Could it?
Something is being overlooked in the burgeoning
number of farmer’s markets, natural grocers and big box
stores, whose increasing demand for organic produce
has so outstripped the number of local organic farmers that we now import “organic” produce from China.
Nowhere in this current scenario does the word “
sustainable” apply. Nowhere.
Even the local, sustainable farms that do exist in the
United States are up against a billion-dollar, fast-food
industrial agriculture system funded by government
subsidies and propped up by immigrant worker wages
and slave labor (read the book The Nobodies by John
Bowe for more on slavery in the United States).
However, in late 2011, an interesting silver lining
appeared on the dark cloud surrounding the future
of farming in the United States, when the Beginning
Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act was introduced in
congress. The act, cosponsored by the National Sustain-
able Agriculture Coalition, NSAC, is a “sign of awareness
of the need for farmers,” but acknowledges that the high
barriers to entry “make farming and ranching one of the
hardest careers to pursue.”
“Limited access to land and markets, hyperinflation
in land prices, high input costs, farm and tax policy
disadvantages, and lack of training discourage many
would-be producers from entering agriculture,” states
the NSAC’s website. “As a result, the average American
farmer is now 57 years old, and the fastest growing
group of farm operators are those 65 years and older.”
What an exceptional opportunity this could be in the
coming years, if substantial and ongoing federal funding
is committed to creating a new generation of farmers.
Just as my family was lured into a relationship with the
Earth through romantic notions, I am sure many others
will be, as well.
The nine biodynamic preparaTions can be made on-farm wiTh naTurally occurring plan T and animal maTerials combined
in sPeciFic reciPes in certain
seasons oF the year.
While it took years of exploring a variety of sustainable farming practices before we finally hit upon one
that included our own consciousness as a part of the
health and healing of ourselves and the Earth, we are
impressed with the high quality of food and relationship with the Earth that Biodynamics produces. With a
truly sustainable and holistic approach, Biodynamics
seeks to reconcile the split in the human as well as the
few discernible inches between the self-sustaining forest
and farmland.
“As the farmer grows, so grows the community and
the culture. Those people who grow the food and tend
the animals, and cultivate the fibers, are among the most
important people in our society,” writes Parker Forsell,
the Biodynamic program coordinator at Angelic Organics
(managed by “Farmer John” Peterson of the documentary,
The Dirt on Farmer John). “It is not the sports stars or the
Hollywood movie stars that are the hub of culture. The
farmers with their hands in the soil, or on the bodies of
baby animals, or on the wheels of the grain combine enable us all to think good thoughts, to feel warmth in our
hearts, and to run, and jump and grow in our bodies.”
The Origin of Biodynamics
Biodynamics began when German farmers—at the
height of the agricultural crisis brought about by new
chemical fertilizers in the early 20th century—became
concerned about the decreasing fertility in their soil
and increasingly diseased cattle. The farmers turned to
Austrian philosopher and scientist Rudolf Steiner for
help. Steiner, initially an editor of the scientific works of
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, integrated his disciplined
scientific mind with his spiritually gifted clairvoyance
to found Anthroposophy—the philosophy of spiritual
science that led to Waldorf education, the movement art
form of eurythmy, and valuable contributions to medicine, architecture, drama and poetry.
Only after being intensely persuaded for many years,
the story goes, Steiner finally answered the German
farmers’ requests for help. In his series of eight lectures,
entitled The Agriculture Course, presented less than a
year before his death in 1925, Steiner provided a new
science of cosmic influences that would reorient the
