The manifesto of modern Biodynamics

Modern Biodynamic Agriculture expresses the most coherent evolution and application of Rudolf Steiner’s postulates presented to farmers in lectures given in Koberwitz June 7-16, 1924.

We owe it to a man like Rudolf Steiner and his capacity for critical reworking that today we have not lost the wealth of knowledge that over the millennia has accompanied the cultural and agricultural development of advanced peoples of the West as well as the East. Rudolf Steiner was neither an agronomist nor a farmer; his intent was to lay the groundwork so that the agriculture of the future could be developed, not in the form of dogma, but through research: by experimenting, verifying and translating the results into numbers and tables that were clear enough to be then disseminated and used by all.

After Steiner’s death, in Europe, Biodynamics underwent a process of intellectualization, which predominantly favored its esoteric drifts; even in Italy, Biodynamic Agriculture failed to assert itself, overloaded as it was with religious-philosophical tasks that transcended and disregarded agricultural practice. Modern Biodynamic Agriculture aims to identify and disseminate an applicable and irrefutable method of operation, where man, having regained his wholeness-with no need for separation between the spiritual and physical dimensions-has the ability to be free in his knowledge of nature and its transposition into agricultural acts.

Modern Biodynamic Agriculture is free from the limitations of materialist science, and even with it it must dialogue, and is at the same time secular because it does not need to find ultimate justification in a principle outside itself. For this “parallel” science, which has its own specific vocabulary, we propose a new language capable of clearly and effectively conveying its principles, which, removed from the interpretation of a few gurus, may enable Modern Biodynamics to become the agriculture of the 21st century.