Stirring biodynamic preparations: a guide to dynamisation

Before horn manure, horn silica or barrel compost go onto the land, they are stirred in water. Horn manure and horn silica for an hour, alternating between a deep vortex and seething chaos, in lukewarm rainwater. Without this hour the preparation does not get into the water.

This guide shows how stirring works, by hand and with equipment, which water and which temperature, how much one person can manage, which mistakes are common and how soon to spray afterwards.

What happens when you stir

The water is driven quickly in one direction along the edge until a crater forms in the middle that reaches almost to the bottom. Then the direction of rotation is reversed with full force. The crater collapses, the water starts to seethe, air bubbles are pulled down to the very bottom, and out of this disorder the next crater immediately builds up in the opposite direction. This alternation continues without a break until the end of the hour.

Both states have their task. The crater orders the water in layers and moves the whole mass. The seething destroys this order again and mixes in what has settled in the meantime. For when the water circles, the heavy particles sink down in the middle. Without vigorous seething they stay there and drop out of the mixture.

The consistency of the water changes as you go. After about half an hour the viscosity drops, the liquid splashes less, the sound of stirring becomes deeper, it holds more air and is easier to move. With your hand in the water you can feel the water becoming softer. Horn manure turns brown and silky, stirred horn silica water milky white.

What Rudolf Steiner said about it

The description in the Agriculture Course is short and very concrete:

"Then it is necessary to bring the whole content of the cow horn into thorough connection with the water. That means you must now begin to stir, and stir in such a way that you stir quickly round the edge of the bucket, at the periphery, so that inside a crater forms almost down to the bottom, so that the whole is indeed rotating all round. Then you quickly reverse, so that the whole now seethes in the opposite direction. If you continue this for an hour, you get a thorough penetration."

Agriculture Course, fourth lecture, translated from the German

When asked, he added what matters: "An enormous amount depends on bringing about an intimate penetration. Pouring the substance into the water and stirring it round is far from a real penetration."

Four indications are contained in this, and they are the measure for everything else: quickly, at the outer edge, a crater almost to the bottom, reversal until it seethes.

The same applies to horn silica, including the hour. Steiner himself made a practical trial only once, in 1924 in Arlesheim. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer described it: a bucket was filled with water, and because nothing else was to hand, Pfeiffer's walking stick served as stirrer. "What mattered most to Rudolf Steiner was to show the energetic stirring, the forming of the funnel and the rapid reversal of direction."

The hour

An hour is the time it takes for something to be completed. That is how the indication is understood in biodynamic practice, and that is how it is kept.

Two old trials support it. In 1940 Hans Heinze found that horn manure stirred for a full hour brought more growth than preparation stirred for only 45 minutes. Enzo Nastati and Maria Thun came independently to the same result, that an hour is the optimum. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer was blunter: "Anyone who, out of convenience, stirs for a shorter time or less intensively has only themselves to blame for failure."

Some people divide the hour inwardly, into three sections of twenty minutes or four quarters. That is habit, not a rule.

Two preparations are an exception. Barrel compost was already dynamised for an hour when it was made and needs only 15 to 20 minutes before application. Plant teas and herbal extracts are also stirred for about 20 minutes.

An alarm clock is the better clock. Looking at a watch breaks your concentration; setting an alarm lets you stir through the hour without looking up once.

The water

Origin

Steiner spoke of "ordinary water". He said this in Koberwitz, where the water was very rich in iron. In practice the old gardeners' order has held ever since: soft rainwater first, then pond or river water, hard cold well water last. Well and ground water can be left to stand in the air so that it takes on the air temperature.

Rainwater needs a little care. Algae form in the butt, it can turn foul if stored for a long time, and mosquito larvae settle in it. Fly screens, dark closed containers and moving the water help. Washing-up liquid does not belong in it.

Where the air and roofs are polluted, rainwater is the poorer choice. And where tap water is chlorinated, the detour via the rain butt is worth it.

Warmth

Steiner said the water should be "perhaps somewhat warmed". What practice has made of this can be read from the figures gathered over a hundred years. Almost all of them lie within one window:

"Lukewarm" in the literature means between 25 and 38 °C, depending on whom you ask. If you keep to 35 to 37 °C and use rainwater, you are on the safe side.

Ice-cold water is not stirred. A practical test: if you shudder at the cold when you reach in, it is too cold.

Warm the whole quantity evenly rather than mixing hot water into cold. Water over a flame warms from below, so either stir diligently while warming or heat very slowly. The temperature does not have to be held during the hour of stirring; a slight drop is normal. Where it is cool and windy, a sack around the barrel helps.

For the arithmetic: bringing 100 litres from 15 to 35 °C takes 8.4 megajoules, a good two kilowatt hours. Over an open fire, which puts only a small part of the heat into the water, that is several kilos of wood. A sunny south wall, a solar collector or a gas water heater work more economically. Electrically heated water is consistently not recommended in the literature.

Quantity

The amount of water depends on the area and on the spraying technique. The recommendations of the last hundred years vary widely, because nozzles and equipment have changed:

In the home garden a simpler rule applies: take a vessel you can stir well in, with a total capacity of ten to thirty litres, fill it halfway, stir and distribute the result evenly.

That the preparations are stirred for a full hour limits the quantity more than anything else. That is why the trend is towards more economical application rather than bigger barrels.

The vessel

Shape. Round in cross-section, cylindrical, with smooth walls. Bulging wine barrels look beautiful but work poorly: the bottom becomes too small, you cannot get far enough out, and the vortex collapses early. Vessels with pronounced shoulders have the same problem. A slightly conical barrel that is wider at the bottom stirs easily and hardly slops over.

Proportion. Taller rather than wider. Common are diameter to height in the golden ratio, about 1 to 1.6, or height to diameter 1.4 to 1, or diameter to height 2 to 3. A tall vessel has the advantage that the water does not keep wanting to slop over when you stir intensively.

Filling level. Two thirds at most. The water level rises at the edge when you stir. A bucket you fill only halfway, because small quantities get going easily, the crater becomes deeper and the water rises higher. Mark the water level as a notch in the barrel wall or on a stick, then you do not have to measure anew each time.

Material. Wood, stoneware, glass, copper, stainless steel and enamel are common. Galvanised metal and aluminium are rejected, as are rusting oil drums. Plastic is tolerated where nothing else is available. It is also important that the vessel is clean and has never been in contact with chemicals or essential oils.

Bottom. Flat bottoms are common; domed ones are considered better, because they have no edge where sediment collects.

The 200-litre drums found everywhere have a diameter of about 58 centimetres. That is too large for most people to still stir dynamically.

The stirrer

It must offer the water resistance. A stick that is too thin yields to the water: the water suddenly resists, the stirrer goes the wrong way, and the momentum is gone. The walking stick of 1924 was a makeshift, not a recommendation.

Tightly bound bundles of birch twigs, turned wooden stirrers and star-shaped stirrers assembled from laths have proved themselves. As a rule of thumb for the suspended birch broom: thickness about a quarter of the barrel diameter, at the top just sticking out of the water, at the bottom cut off straight five centimetres above the floor of the barrel.

The immersion depth is where most goes wrong. If you stir only in the upper half, you do not set the lower half moving, and what settles at the bottom no longer comes into the mixture.

Stirring with your bare hand has its own advantage: you feel the temperature, you notice when the horn manure is spreading poorly because it is too hard or contains small stones, and you can correct any mistake immediately.

How to stir

1. Set up the vessel. Level, stable, non-slip. If it stands at a slant, the water rises on the lower side and slops over. You can check by measuring all round from the top edge to the water line: the same measure all round, and it stands true.
2. Fill with water and warm it. Up to the mark, that is two thirds at most.
3. Add the preparation. Dissolve horn manure and barrel compost beforehand in a little water so that they disperse. Horn silica can go straight in.
4. Circle. Along the edge, starting deep down, bring it up to speed quickly. The guide value is 150 turns a minute; below that no deep crater forms and reversing gives no proper seething. The upper limit is about 200 turns; beyond that it becomes hectic and loses its rhythm. Keep the stirrer just beside the wall, not in the middle.
5. Reverse. With full force, from your whole body. With larger quantities you brace yourself with both hands against the stirrer as if pushing a cart and use your legs. The best moment is when the stirrer is at the side, neither very close nor very far away. First stop the water, let it seethe, then immediately go at full speed in the opposite direction.
6. Repeat until the hour is up. In a small bucket the crater stands after ten turns, so you reverse every two and a half seconds. With 150 litres four reversals a minute are possible, three towards the end of the hour.

Reverse by the water, not by the clock. Fixed intervals of one minute, as older guides give, mean in practice that you are turning idly in circles, and that is a pause.

A good sign: the water carries you. If you constantly have to push, either you are not yet up to speed, started too slowly, or have too much water in the barrel.

How much one person can stir

For most people 120 litres is the upper limit if stirring is to be truly intensive. A vivid measure for everything beyond that: stirring 500 litres is roughly like pushing a small car around the yard for an hour, there and back, there and back.

The criterion is not whether you somehow get the water moving, but whether you get it going at once so that you are carried along. Otherwise it is too much water.

The common mistakes

Almost all mistakes come down to stirring too little intensively.

• Too much water in the barrel. The most common mistake of all. Less water, but done properly.
• Too large a diameter. On each round you have to lean far forward, and the strength is lost.
• A stirrer that is too thin or too unstable. It cannot engage energetically with the water.
• Immersed too shallowly. The lower half leads a life of its own.
• Stirring in the middle. It turns fast there, but the main mass of water at the edge hardly moves. The crater becomes narrow and funnel-shaped instead of wide and straight.
• A pause before reversing. Pulling the stirrer out, letting it swing on, waiting until the water is calm and then slowly building a new crater: that way it does not seethe.
• Reversing by the clock instead of by the water.
• Increasing the rotation slowly instead of going up to speed quickly.
• Too high a water level. At the top it is still turning the old way while the new direction is already running below, and the reversal fizzles out.

A useful diagnostic sign: if after reversing the water surface first calms down, then suddenly surges and slowly turns in the new direction, the reversal was too weak.

The stirring place

Pleasant to work in, with everything within reach. Shade where it is warm, shelter from wind where it is cool and damp. A good solution is a place with sun in the morning and shade in the afternoon, because horn silica is stirred in the morning and horn manure in the afternoon.

For knapsack sprayers, set the barrel about 90 centimetres above the ground so the sprayer can be hooked on and off comfortably. Table height is too low. If you work with an outlet tap, set the barrel high enough for the sprayer to fit underneath.

If you stir often, set it up as a chain: water supply at the top, below it the warming, below that the stirring vessel, below that the sprayer. The water then runs from stage to stage by itself.

Tell the people around you beforehand that you will be busy in the same place for an hour. Conversation does not disturb, as long as people respect the stirring. The phone stays away, because it brings strangers into the middle of the hour.

And a trial run before the season is worth it: set up the stirring equipment, fill it with clear water, stir for a few minutes, adjust. Spending a whole hour struggling with equipment that does not fit is not a good hour.

Straining and applying

The question of sieving came up as early as 1924. Steiner's answer: "You can strain it, that does no harm."

In practice it is almost always necessary once nozzles and pumps are involved. Blocked lines in the middle of the field cost more time than sieving. The sieve should be finer than the nozzle opening; with diaphragm pumps it is sieved to half a millimetre. Horn manure brings more coarse material than horn silica, so separate filters for the two are usual.

Proven solutions range from a filter hose with 0.2 millimetre mesh through cylindrical stainless steel sieves that flush themselves clean when filling to an old stocking for small quantities. Synthetic fibre is better than natural fibre, which swells and clogs. Pass the liquid through the sieve from outside to inside; then the residue stays on the outside and can be rinsed off.

Application follows promptly. Horn manure within two to three hours, better at once. With barrel compost you have about three days.

Stirring together

From the start Steiner thought of stirring as something several people do:

"It will come to the point where this is quite simply done on Sundays after dinner. Then, just by having many guests to invite and doing it on Sundays, with the necessary conversation, the very best will be achieved."

Translated from the German

Countess Johanna von Keyserlingk handed down his advice from the same day: "You always have so many guests here; when they have finished their coffee, each of them is simply given a bowl to stir."

That still works today, and it solves the quantity problem along the way. On 164 hectares of vines and olive trees in New Zealand, Colin Ross applies horn manure on three afternoons, four fifths of it with bucket and hand brush. His key: three people at every stirring station, so that no one is alone. The three take turns every five minutes, which keeps the momentum going to the end.

In western Switzerland an open stirring day has been held since 2009, with invitations twice a year. The schedule: from 3 p.m. warm the water, with a short introduction; from 4 to 5 p.m. stir together with constant changeovers; afterwards everyone takes stirred preparation home and applies it there. All that is needed is rainwater and something to spray it with.

What such an occasion needs: enough safe stirring equipment, one person who keeps an eye on the time and makes sure someone is always stirring, and an introduction beforehand. And the preparations should be at the centre, not run as an item on the fringe of a farm festival.

Children are easy to enthuse. A box next to the barrel so they can look in, an hourglass so time becomes visible, and preferably stir barrel compost, which needs only 20 minutes. The explanation can be very simple: first we turn faster and faster until the water runs round in a circle really fast. And then comes the big moment, we stop the fast water, it fights back and bubbles and foams, and then we start turning again.

With a machine

Above a certain farm size, stirring is done by machine. Motorised stirring barrels often have a float or probe that reverses the direction as soon as the crater reaches a certain depth. Tuning such a machine — rotation speed, height and position of the paddles and the moment of reversal — is fine work.

Steiner was reserved about stirring machines and suggested stirring with guests instead. Many farms today mix both: horn manure by hand, because several people can join in, horn silica early in the morning by machine, because it is hard to find people at that hour.

Stirring machines running unattended are the most dangerous equipment in the whole field of preparations. A lid that switches off the motor when opened is the minimum.

Frequently asked questions

What does dynamisation mean?

The rhythmic stirring of the preparation in water, alternating between crater and seething. Both words are used, stirring and dynamising.

How long is it stirred?

Horn manure and horn silica for an hour. Barrel compost 15 to 20 minutes, because it was already dynamised when it was made. Plant teas and herbal extracts also about 20 minutes.

How fast must I turn?

About 150 turns a minute, that is two and a half per second. Slower, no deep crater forms and reversing does not produce seething.

How warm should the water be?

35 to 37 °C is the most common figure. Ice-cold water is not stirred.

How much water can I stir alone?

By hand up to about 55 litres, with a suspended stirrer 120 to 160 litres. For most people 120 litres is the sensible limit.

Do I have to dissolve the preparation first?

Horn manure and barrel compost are dissolved in a little water so that they disperse. Horn silica can go straight into the water.

May I take my hand out of the water?

Briefly, to place it in the crater and start the counter-movement deep down, that is part of the technique. Taking it out and waiting for the water to calm is something else: then the seething is missing.

Must one person stir for the whole hour?

No. Taking turns is usual and sensible with large quantities, as long as no pause arises. At the handover, both keep stirring together for a moment.

How do I know I am stirring properly?

The water carries you. On reversing it surges at once, it seethes to the bottom, air bubbles reach the floor, and within a few turns the new crater stands.

Do I have to sieve?

Once nozzles and pumps are involved, yes. The sieve should be finer than the nozzle opening.

How soon after stirring must I spray?

Horn manure within two to three hours. Barrel compost keeps for about three days.

Sources

• Rudolf Steiner: Agriculture Course (GA 327), fourth lecture and the associated answers to questions.
• Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners. Herstellung und Anwendung, chapter 15 (water) and chapter 16 (stirring) with appendices 16A1 to 16A20.
• Pierre and Vincent Masson: Landwirtschaft, Garten- und Weinbau biodynamisch (2015), pp. 29 to 41.
• Christian von Wistinghausen et al.: Anwendung der Feldspritz- und Düngerpräparate.
• Ehrenfried Pfeiffer (1938 and 1955) on the duration of stirring and the attitude when stirring.
• Georg Merckens (1960) on setting up the suspended stirrer.
• Hans Heinze (1940) on the comparison of 45 and 60 minutes of stirring.