From a Member: Sharing Resources with the Community of Spiritual Agriculture

Photo by Tracey Eller

At the dawn of this new decade, you can renew the vitality of the earth, the integrity of our food, and the health and wholeness of our communities by becoming a member of the Biodynamic Association or renewing your membership now, and inviting friends and family to join you in membership. Members are the living essence of the Biodynamic Association, and to start 2020 strong our goal is for 500 members to renew or join before April 30, collectively giving at least $50,000 in member dues to support the work of the BDA. 

By Claudia J. Ford

Dear BDA Community,

I am pleased to renew my BDA membership and wanted to share with you why this action is so meaningful to me. At this moment I feel that I am individually, and perhaps we are collectively, in a time when so much is pulling for our attention, asking us to spend an ever-shrinking currency of labor, emotion, time, and money for the precious resources that feed our bodies, minds, and souls. I am drawn by the necessity to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis. I am pulled by the needs of displaced communities and wrongfully incarcerated populations. Family urgency and trauma tugs at me. I hear the cries of the marginalized human and non-human cohabitants of our planet and I cannot turn away.

Yet somehow this donation to the Biodynamic Association, and the time, energy, and money I am willing to give this movement, is a small step in heeding to all of these pressing issues. I happily share my resources with this community of spiritual agriculture, and I hope others will join me.

I value the BDA’s promotion and support of biodynamic agriculture for many reasons. I appreciate biodynamic agriculture for its unique perspective on the entity of the farm and the role of the farmer; for the extraordinarily high energetic and nutritional quality of the food produced; for its full embrace of agricultural science and research; and for its unapologetic infusion of the cosmos, plant medicines, and spirituality into agriculture. Biodynamic agriculture insists that we should be able to examine our perceptions, that our awareness gained in spiritual practice should be testable in the physical realities of our farms and gardens. Biodynamic agriculture emphasizes that the knowledge gleaned in the imaginal world should be fully translatable through application and practice into the requirements of the material world. Through the practices of biodynamic agriculture, we are encouraged to experience and substantiate our spiritual insights in the quality of our soil, the chemistry of our compost, the health of our animals, the taste of our foods and wines, and the healing properties of our sacred medicinal plants. For these reasons I thankfully renew my membership in the Biodynamic Association, and I urge others to join me.

I value the BDA for emphasizing that the ethical costs and social injustices of industrialized agriculture are intolerable, and reminding us that one way to correct this is to make sacred again our concepts of nature and our connections to Earth and each other. To heal both our farmland and our relationships, and to connect with each other across vast chasms of difference and histories of trauma and oppression, we must simultaneously strive to grow our social justice commitments, and our spiritual practices, while learning to hear and attend to the language of the natural world. The language of justice and the language of the Earth can be accessed through the spiritual. Spiritual agriculture, including the specific human consciousness development pathways laid out by anthroposophy, biodynamics, and Rudolf Steiner, speak deeply and clearly to the ways we can access this healing and transcendent language.

Thank you to the Biodynamic Association for educating us, reminding us of these sacred connections, and for doing what is necessary to see that this work continues when and where it is most needed. I hope others will join me in joining or renewing membership in this community and, through our membership and donations, commit to the continuation of the BDA’s important mission.

With love, 

Claudia