A regenerative farming method founded by Rudolf Steiner at Koberwitz in 1924, treating each farm as a living organism nourished by nine cosmic preparations.
Biodynamic agriculture is the farming system Rudolf Steiner founded across eight lectures at Koberwitz in June 1924. It treats each farm as a self-contained living organism, asks the farmer to read the rhythms of sun, moon, and zodiac, and uses nine numbered preparations (500 through 508) to draw etheric and cosmic forces into soil, compost, and plant. Demeter is its certification body.
In Steiner's Own Words
The forces that place the etheric body into the world come from the circle of the world, just as those for the physical body radiate from the center of the earth. But with the etheric forces that flow into the earth from the circumference of the cosmos also come those world impulses that work in the astral body of the human being. The ether is like a sea in which the astral forces approach the earth, floating from the far reaches of the cosmos. In the present cosmic age, however, only the mineral and plant kingdoms can enter into a direct relationship with the astral, which flows in upon the earth on the waves of the ether. In the plant kingdom, one can see how the manifold wonderful forms are formed by the astral being released from the ether and working over the plant world.
What it Means Today
The Koberwitz lectures arrived in answer to a practical crisis. German farmers in 1923 came to Steiner with declining seed vigour, shorter lucerne rotations, and rising livestock disease. Their question was simple. What had been lost. Steiner's answer began with the passage above. The forces that build a plant do not rise from the soil alone. They flow inward from the cosmic circumference, met by the mineral life of the ground, and the plant kingdom stands at exactly that meeting place. Biodynamic preparations are designed to amplify the meeting. Horn manure (500) buries cow horns packed with manure through winter to concentrate the soil's downward, life-giving forces. Horn silica (501) does the inverse, gathering summer light into ground quartz. The six compost preparations (502 through 507) work yarrow, chamomile, nettle, oak bark, dandelion, and valerian into the heap so that astrality and etheric forces interpenetrate properly as the pile breaks down.
Biodynamic farmers today, certified through Demeter on more than 250,000 hectares across 65+ countries, plant by lunar and zodiacal calendars, keep livestock as part of the farm organism rather than as inputs, and treat the soil as a living being with its own breathing. The practical commitment is what differentiates the work from organic certification. Demeter requires the preparations, the on-farm closed cycle, and a farm-as-organism approach. What Pfeiffer called the birth-hour of a world agricultural movement, on that summer afternoon in 1924 when the first horn was lifted from the Sonnenhof garden, has become the longest continuously practised regenerative system on earth. For the shorter umbrella entry covering the everyday usage of the term (vineyards, certified farms, the planting calendar), see Biodynamic.
Where to Read More
- Agriculture Course, GA 327, the eight Koberwitz lectures (canonical text)
- Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, GA 26, full text
- Buy Agriculture Course from SteinerBooks
- Biodynamic Agriculture: Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Farming System
- The Agriculture Course by Rudolf Steiner: The Birth of Biodynamic Farming
- Biodynamic Farming: Rudolf Steiner's Agriculture Course and the Living Farm Organism