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.
biodynamic
Learning from a Mentor
Learning
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.
It's always busiest in spring
It’s always busiest preparing in spring. The workload is almost three times what it is almost any other time of the year. The winter “break” is welcome, assuming you aren’t preoccupied with small repairs, building infrastructure, and catching up on paperwork. But by the time spring approaches, who’s really had time to balance their soils properly? This is an entirely separate skillset and can seem daunting for backyard gardeners and farmers alike. But if you want to get the best yield for your time and you want to get the best flavor (as well as nutrient-density) you want to have balanced soils. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer liked to say that what we see produced in the garden today is not really the effect of what we did this year but rather the effect of what we did last year. Though it may seem early, farmers and gardeners should already been thinking of next year even as we get started in spring.
For those of us with busy lives but still with an active desire to get the best out of our gardens, we offer consultations to be a helping hand through the year. For the smallholder or the commercial grower, we offer decades of collective experience and can customize a program just for you.
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