Posted on Jul 13, 2016
First installment in the Tierra Viva series
By Thea Maria Carlson“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.” — Joanna Macy
The understanding that the earth is alive was once widespread — and still exists in many indigenous cultures and spiritual traditions today. Yet for centuries the dominant Western culture has treated the earth as an inanimate object, a storehouse of resources for us to extract, and a sewer to absorb our wastes. Industrial agriculture arises from...
Posted on Jun 23, 2016
By Andrew Toothacker
Arriving within a week of one another, Victor Kubia and I came to study biodynamics at the Pfeiffer Center in September of 2015. It isn’t enough to say that we come from very contrasting life situations: Victor is a spry 57-year-old from Bamenda, Cameroon, and I am a 22-year-old from Portland, Oregon. Despite the gap of common experiences, however, Victor and I became comrades the instant we met.
It was a blue day with powerful clarity when Victor appeared in the doorway of the tiny Pfeiffer Center cabin. This man was perfectly jolly despite having just driven 27 hours straight from Oklahoma, where his six children were beginning their school year. Sitting alone in the cabin, I was the very first person he had met in New York.
Immediately he confessed two things to me. One was that he desperately needed a job, and the...
Posted on May 23, 2016
By Sally Voris, White Rose Farm
In 1924, Rudolf Steiner gave a series of eight lectures to farmers in what is now Poland who wanted to understand why the quality of their food was declining. Those lectures form the basis of biodynamic agriculture. Steiner framed agriculture in the context of the cosmos. He said invisible spiritual forces, acting through the stars, the planets, the sun, and the moon, were vital to life on Earth. He asked farmers to imagine their farms as individual living organisms, and he gave specific practices to build farm vitality.
After some ten years of farming using biodynamic practices, I noticed that the produce nearly popped with energy and flavor. It was easier to farm. I felt like I was now dancing with a living partner—the farm. I realized that plants don't just grow out of the soil;...
Posted on May 16, 2016
By Megan Durney, Pfeiffer Center
There is a special quality about the mid-winter time of year, between January 15 th and February 15 th . Here on the East Coast, we try our best to imagine the next season’s beauty and bounty during the winter when we are more inside and inward. As winter shrouds us with snow and cold temperatures, a mid-winter festival where the mysteries and questions inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture are gathered around and warmed by human hearts seems appropriate to light our way into the depths of the darkness and winter’s cold. For eight years the Pfeiffer Center has been hosting an annual mid-winter gathering with the Agriculture Course as the central theme, but each year stemming in a particular direction from the complex topic of earthly and cosmic nutrition to the horn manure and silica preparations.
During...
Posted on Apr 4, 2016
By Jeff Schreiber, Three Sisters Community Farm
Plenty of artists create works of art about farms, and there are surely many farmers who are also painters, poets or musicians. Many farms, even, offer artist-in-residency programs so that artists can create and be inspired in a beautiful and simple environment, away from the cares of the real world. But what about the act of farming as art, or the farm itself as an actual work of art?
We’re not accustomed to thinking of farming in this way. Farming is about the production of foodstuffs — it’s business ( agri business), not art, right? A farmer/artist, like Wendell Berry, does his or her farming and then — after the work is done — sets about writing beautiful poems.
We’re also not accustomed to thinking of art like this. A work of art, to most, is something static —...
Posted on Mar 14, 2016
The Biodynamic Winter Intensives were held at the Nature Institute and Hawthorne Valley Farm during the weeks of February 8-12 and 15-19. Jonathan Code from Crossfields Institute International , based in Stroud in England, joined the faculty for the second of the two weeks. Jonathan co-directs a distance-learning, postgraduate course called Researching Holistic Approaches to Agroecology , which supports research and inquiry into a variety of approaches to land stewardship and social development related to agroecological initiatives. The course currently supports students in Canada, the US, England, Malawi, and Denmark and is enrolling now for the autumn 2016. Biodynamics features as one of the strands of the course.
By Jonathan Code
I landed back in the UK from the recent Hawthorne Valley winter intensives to find a real buzz in...
Posted on Feb 11, 2016
Originally published by RSF Social Finance in the Winter 2016 RSF Quarterly
Abbot Hill in Wilton, New Hampshire, is home to High Mowing School , a Waldorf boarding high school, and Temple-Wilton Community Farm, one of the first biodynamic community supported agriculture (CSA) programs in the U.S. Also nearby is the Yggdrasil Land Foundation, an agricultural land trust committed to protecting biodynamic farmland. The result of such close proximity has been an extraordinarily collaborative project between High Mowing, which purchased farmland adjacent to its campus, and Yggdrasil, which purchased the conservation easement rights. The protected land is now used by the school, and is also leased to Temple-Wilton to support its grazing and feed needs. In the midst of all this activity, Brad Miller, a biodynamic farmer turned teacher at High...
