Agriculture Course

What is the Agriculture Course?

The Agriculture Course is the series of lectures with which Rudolf Steiner founded biodynamic agriculture in 1924. In the collected edition of his works it has the number GA 327; its full German title is "Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft" (spiritual-scientific foundations for the flourishing of agriculture). It is the original text to which the whole biodynamic method and its specialist literature go back. Every later work, from Wistinghausen and Maria Thun to Masson, builds on it.

How it came about at Koberwitz

Steiner gave the course at Whitsun 1924 at Koberwitz, the estate of the Keyserlingk family in what was then Silesia (today Kobierzyce, Poland). His audience numbered around a hundred, mostly farmers, estate owners and scientists. The occasion was concrete: with the spread of mineral fertilisers, many farmers had seen soil fertility, seed, plant health and animal health decline, and they asked Steiner for advice. The course consists of eight lectures, together with question-and-answer sessions and an address. It was Steiner's last major lecture cycle; he died the following year.

What the eight lectures cover

The course develops a coherent picture that moves from the large scale to practice.

The first lectures lay the foundations: the interplay of earthly and cosmic forces, and the soil seen as part of a living natural process. In the second lecture, Steiner sets out the guiding image of the farm organism: the farm as "a self-contained individuality". Later lectures deal with the role of substances (nitrogen, lime, silica and others) in plant growth.

In the fourth lecture, Steiner describes the two horn preparations: horn manure 500 (cow manure in a cow horn) and horn silica 501 (quartz in a cow horn), how they are made, stirred and applied. The fifth lecture is devoted to the compost preparations (yarrow, chamomile, stinging nettle, oak bark, dandelion and valerian) and their task of bringing the manure to life. Further lectures cover plant diseases and "pests", the interaction of plants and animals, and the character of the farm.

Significance

The course is not an agricultural handbook in the usual sense but a set of suggestions grounded in spiritual science. Steiner gave images, connections and recipes, but saw them as a starting point for people's own trials, not as finished instructions. That is exactly why decades of practical work were needed after him before today's preparation practice had been worked out. Anyone who wants to follow the course in detail therefore also turns to the later works that build on it (Wistinghausen, Masson, Stappung).

Context

The Agriculture Course is Steiner's spiritual-scientific view of agriculture. As such it is the key text that biodynamics still takes its bearings from today, and the text its critics take aim at. In this lexicon it serves as the authoritative original source to which individual terms (preparations, farm organism, cosmic rhythms) are traced back.