Death and Immortality on the Farm

Farming isn’t for everyone. When we got started, our naïve can-do attitude thought of Nature as being far more idyllic than it was, and we imagined that coworkers would be far more collaborative than it turns out they really were. Death is a daily fact on the farm. It’s not for everyone to stare death in the face. You can’t push it out of your mind, because it is the basis of your livelihood. Even a human family, while circumscribed by daily dangers, tends to strive to forget the reality of death. You can’t do that if you farm, and you can barely do that if you tend a garden.

Death is what facilitates new life. It is not a mistake. As the Quran says, “Everything is perishing except for His face,” or as the Buddha says, “Everything is fire.” The world of perpetual change (samsara) is the basis of our suffering, not because change or death is the problem but rather because our attachment to transient things is the problem. The phenomenal world is characterized by dualities of good and bad, life and death, black and white, us versus them, and none of these persist more than a moment. The idea of “dark” persists — the idea of “death” persists — but so too does the idea of life. The word maya is a cognate with the word magic. The three Magi who visited the Christ are relatives of this term in more ways than one. Maya does not mean illusion but rather the divine manifesting powers of Divinity. Maya is only a delusion when we believe it is the only and final reality, and there the delusion belongs to us, not to maya.

What is the purpose of a mortal life? What is the purpose of a universe that will end? It is so that the Absolute has a mirror to witness Itself. The world is God’s mirror, so that he can see his own face. We are, so to speak, mere neurons in the mind of God. When we attempt to live of a life of “me” separate from the Divine contextual whole, that is a misfiring neuron — or, worse, the logic of cancerous growth.

The farm should be a place that fosters the capacity for ever-more reflection of the Divine Image in human form. There is no calling more sacred than supplying the material and spiritual basis for the renewal of the Earth, because the Earth is the singular platform for the human experience, and our singular purpose is to attain immortality by becoming the Self-Consciousness of Divinity. How could we ever be forgotten if we become conscious participants of that eternal field of awareness? This is why we farm, this is why we live.

The farm as an organism has a lifespan and, eventually, it too will perish. But, like the meadow that blossoms again in spring, the farm principle will itself reincarnate once more. Everything we learn in a life carries over. No experience is lost even when the outer form is shed.

The Living Farm Organism

In the beginning, as Rudolf Steiner puts it, a child is virtually a pure “sense organ”, which is to say, all it can do is absorb from the environment: food, water, impressions from people, etc. During this stage, an infant is pretty helpless. It needs constant tending and more concentrated direct attention than it will probably ever receive again. The same is true for the farm organism. As Bill Mollison liked to advise people: spent the first year doing nothing but observing. Just witness the cycles of nature on the farm. What plants grow in different areas? What are your weed problems? What patches of soil dry out? What areas get water-logged?

Initially, all the farm can do is “take” from the farmers, from the environment, and it gobbles up time, energy, and resources like a voracious child. It takes a number of years for this infant farm organism to really begin to be able to sustain itself and at least be able to take care of itself in a basic way. Expect the farm to take for the first seven years. Such a farm isn’t even (so to speak) “potty trained.” You wouldn’t expect an infant to help you set the table, so be careful not to expect too much from your farm too soon. Trying to force the farm to “grow up” too quickly is also inadvisable, because it develops hardened and set patterns too early. If you want to change those habits and optimize the farm later, it is much harder to undo bad habits than it is to learn new good habits.

Rather than pushing your farm too quickly or leaving it to trial-and-error, it helps to enlist the wisdom of elders. The hierarchy of experience is all we as human beings have. If you want advise on parenting, it’s worth speaking to parents. If you want advice on farming, it’s worth speaking to farmers. It’s as simple as that. If we can help you avoid some of our own errors, that’s how we make a better world. The value of avoiding decades of mistakes is priceless. How do we put a price tag on something priceless? When a small piece of advice, gained by years of struggling, can save you hundreds of dollars every year for the rest of the life of the farm? How can someone charge the real value of something like? We can’t! So we charge based on what we now feel our time is worth. If we take our time away from farming or teaching, we need to be able to earn as much as we would doing these other tasks. We don’t charge you what our time is worth or charge you for how much time we save you, because that’s priceless.

Learning from a Mentor

Hugh J. Courtney examining “horn manure” preparation samples in 2015

Energy only flows from high concentration to low concentration. This principle is expressed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that order tends to decrease over time. A more accessible way to understand this principle is that useful energy decreases as it is spent. Over time, there isn’t enough of a differential for energy to flow. But this is only given a closed system. Yes, the universe as a whole tends towards disorder but that same tendency allows for pockets of what appears to be negative entropy, where order seems to increase. Cases like this include the Earth in relation to the Sun. The Sun is always losing energy, but because the Earth always has less energy than the Sun. Because of this, the Earth continues to receive a new influx of energy. This is the possibility of evolution and the possibility of soil development. If there weren’t new energy flowing into the garden every year, there would be no possibility of soil development.

The same is true of knowledge. A mentor can only instruct you in what he knows. And you can only learn if you admit that you do not yet know. If we pretend to know that which we do not know, we block ourselves off from development and from the possibility of acquiring true knowledge. In an era opposed to hierarchies, we’ve lost sight of the hierarchy of experience. Respect for elders doesn’t come from any innate authority, but from years of experience. A good grape year doesn’t immediately make a great wine. Good grapes only become good wine after many years of aging and developing. The student comes to the teacher to learn what is not known, not because the teacher is necessarily morally or spiritually superior but because the teacher possesses knowledge someone else does not possess.

My personal mentor was Hugh J. Courtney, founder of the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics. Shortly before he crossed the threshold, he told me that the next generation would have to take up the work of carrying on biodynamics. That is my work today. I do not just instruct people. I guide clients to realizing their goals and to saving them more time, energy, and money than the mentorship costs. It is the duty of everyone with spiritual knowledge to shine like a star, not hide it under a bushel. It is, of course, possible to go to the “school of hard knocks” and spend years on false-starts and blind alleys, or you can follow the footsteps of someone else who’s already tripped over a lot of the problems along the way. It’s not that the person you follow is superior, they’ve just fallen enough times to warn you about what to avoid. If you want to save yourself endless headaches, enlist the help of someone who has been foolish longer than you in your field of interest.

Asking "Why?"

It’s a lot to ask to know why something happens. Most of us have to be content with the results of what happens without knowing the inner workings. Whether we’re too busy or it’s just beyond our grasp, most of us deal with concrete results. Asking “why” my plant is failing or “why” winter benefits the soil are questions often above our pay grade. This is why we reach to people who have some degree of knowledge about the whys of the world. If someone knows the source of a phenomenon, it is much easier to direct that phenomenon towards our own goals. In biodynamics, we can all use the preparations, but if we do not know the conceptual framework from which they emerged, we are limited to the external results rather than their living inner logic. If you knew that you could earn $500 more in produce every month, a $100/mo. fee for consulting already pays for itself. You don’t necessarily have to comprehend the secrets of the book of nature, but if you learn from someone who can read the script of Nature, you will produce better yields sooner whether or not you fathom the unmoved mover, the why of the world.