Agriculture Course is the collective title given to the eight lectures Rudolf Steiner delivered between 7 and 16 June 1924 at Koberwitz, near Breslau in what was then eastern Germany, with a closing session held at Dornach on 20 June. Spoken to an audience of farmers, estate managers, and scientists gathered at the invitation of Count and Countess Keyserlingk, this cycle is the founding document of what would become biodynamic agriculture. It is not a manual of tips but a coherent picture of the farm as a living whole, drawing plant growth, soil, manure, and the wider cosmos into a single working system. Because these were the only lectures Steiner gave specifically on farming, the course carries unusual weight: nearly everything later developed under the biodynamic name traces back to the ideas set out here.
Place in Steiner's Work
The Agriculture Course belongs to the last year of Steiner's life, a period of intense practical lecturing in which he addressed medicine, education, theology, and the care of children with disabilities. Having spent two decades building anthroposophy as a path of inner knowledge, he turned in these final courses to concrete fields of work, showing how a spiritual reading of nature could reshape everyday practice. Farming was, in one sense, the most grounded of these applications and, in another, the most ambitious, since it asked practitioners to see soil and season as expressions of forces reaching far beyond the visible.
The course grew out of years of concern among anthroposophically minded farmers who had watched soil fertility, seed vitality, and animal health decline under early industrial methods. Count Keyserlingk pressed Steiner repeatedly to speak on the subject, and the Koberwitz estate provided both the setting and a working farm on which the ideas could be tested. What emerged was less a rejection of science than an attempt to widen it, to place the chemistry of the field inside a living context that ordinary agronomy left out. Within Steiner's larger output the course stands as the practical seed of an entire movement, one that continues in certified biodynamic farms and vineyards across the world today.
It helps to read the lectures against the moment in which they were spoken. The years after the First World War had brought the first widespread use of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, and Steiner spoke to men who could already see that stronger chemical inputs did not translate into healthier crops or livestock over time. Rather than prescribe a return to older peasant custom, he tried to recover the intelligence behind that custom and set it on a new footing. The tone of the course is therefore both cautionary and constructive: it names a real crisis in the land while offering a working method to answer it, and it treats the farmer not as a technician applying formulas but as someone tending a living organism whose health depends on judgment and care.
Themes and Structure
Across its eight lectures the course moves from foundation to application. Steiner opens not with the field but with the cosmos, arguing that plant life remains far more immersed in the surrounding universe than human or animal life, and that we cannot understand a growing plant without accounting for what streams toward the earth from sun, moon, and planets. Silica and limestone become the two poles of his picture: the silicious element carries the influence of the distant planets and governs what rises in the plant, while limestone gathers the nearer influences and draws them down into the soil.
From this cosmic frame he builds his central and most enduring image, the farm understood as a self-contained individuality. A healthy farm, in his view, should generate within its own boundaries most of what it consumes, closing the loop between crops, livestock, manure, and land so that fertility circulates rather than being imported and exhausted. As he put it plainly:
A thoroughly healthy farm should be able to produce within itself all that it needs.
Manure receives close attention as the point where this circulation is quickened. Here Steiner introduces the field sprays now known as the horn preparations: cow manure buried over winter in a cow horn to concentrate the earth's living forces, and finely ground quartz treated the same way to gather the light-related forces of summer. One works upward from the soil, the other draws downward from above, and applied together in tiny, well-stirred quantities they are meant to regulate growth so that it is neither too weak nor too rank. Later lectures describe a further set of compost preparations made from yarrow, chamomile, stinging nettle, oak bark, dandelion, and valerian, each chosen to guide a particular process in the ripening of manure and humus.
Two ideas hold this discussion of manure together. The first is that fertility is a matter of enlivening, not merely feeding: the aim is to keep the soil itself alive and receptive rather than to force growth with concentrated salts. The second is that quantity matters far less than quality of process. Steiner is insistent that the preparations be stirred by hand, the water drawn into a deep spiral and then reversed into chaos again, so that the whole body of liquid is brought into rhythmic movement before it is sprayed. He grants that this will strike modern ears as strange, yet he ties it to a wider claim running through the course, that how a thing is done carries into the result as surely as what is done.
The closing lectures widen the view again to weeds, insect pests, plant diseases, and the feeding of livestock, always insisting that these be read as symptoms within the whole rather than isolated problems to be attacked one by one. A weed, for Steiner, points to something in the balance of the land; a pest reveals a disturbance in the relation between plant, soil, and the forces working through them. He even sketches unusual measures, such as burning weed seeds or insect specimens at particular times, that later practitioners have debated and refined. Throughout, he resists the reduction of farming to yield alone, warning that a crop can look splendid and still fail to truly nourish. The measure he proposes is not size or profit but the quality of sustenance the food finally brings to human and animal life.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following entries in the Thalira glossary cite this volume as a source. Each links to a fuller treatment of the term:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of the Agriculture Course online at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translation lecture by lecture. Print editions, including the widely used translations issued under titles such as Agriculture Course and Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, can be found through the publisher at SteinerBooks. Reading the lectures in sequence is worthwhile, since Steiner builds each practical instruction on the cosmological groundwork laid in the opening sessions.
Continue Your Study
To go deeper into the ideas rooted in this volume, you might:
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how biodynamic concepts connect to Steiner's wider vocabulary.
- Start with the core entry on Biodynamic Agriculture for a focused account of the method and its preparations.
- Return to the GA Work Library to explore neighbouring volumes from Steiner's final year of teaching.