History of Biodynamics

Biodynamics – A holistic approach

War is a terrible thing, and none more so than the first world war. It was really this event that completed the industrialisation of farming and finally broke the connections that people had with their land – a process started during the industrial revolution.

The First World War created the explosives factories that then started to sell their products (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium or NPK) to the farmers as chemical fertilisers. Farmers believed that artificial fertilisers would be the answer to depleted soil and poor harvests. But that’s where and when the whole problem just started rather than being solved.

Rudolf Steiner was a scientist as well as a philosopher. He was asked by some Polish and German farmers to help them with their farming problems. Steiner followed Goethe’s way of approaching science – instead of taking everything apart, exaniming the individual parts , adding them together again and drawing conclusions – he wanted to show the whole picture in a holistic and spiritual way (like holistic medicine would look at the whole body including the soul and spirit of each individual person as a whole being rather just the heart, lungs or knee individually).

Steiner worked out his balance by observing plants and animals very closely and in a different way, and recognizing the metamorphoses of each archetype of plant and animal. Steiner developed a series of lectures on biodynamic farming. These lectures still form the basis of modern biodynamic farming and gardening.