Rudolf Steiner

Who was Rudolf Steiner?

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was a philosopher, lecturer, writer and the founder of anthroposophy, a "spiritual science" he developed that sees the spiritual and material worlds as belonging together. Several practical movements grew out of it: Waldorf education, anthroposophic medicine, anthroposophical art and biodynamic agriculture. For biodynamics, Steiner is the founding figure: all the foundations of the method go back to him.

Steiner was an extraordinarily productive thinker with a huge body of lectures and writings. What matters for a biodynamic lexicon is not his work as a whole but a single, late event: the lecture series of 1924 with which he put agriculture on a new footing.

His role in agriculture

In 1924, the last year of his life, Steiner gave the Agriculture Course at Koberwitz estate (in what was then Silesia): eight lectures to around a hundred farmers and estate owners. The occasion was the farmers' growing concern: with the spread of artificial fertilisers they had seen soil fertility decline, seed quality worsen and animal health problems appear. Steiner did not answer with individual tips but with a new overall picture of agriculture.

The central ideas of the method come from these lectures: the guiding image of the farm organism (the farm as "a self-contained individuality"), the biodynamic preparations with their recipes, and the understanding of fertilising as "bringing the earth to life". Steiner expressly did not see his indications as a finished recipe but as a prompt for research; he asked those present to carry out trials and check the effects.

Steiner and the implementation

Steiner himself hardly saw the method worked out; he died in 1925. The work was done by his students and successors: Ehrenfried Pfeiffer was involved in making the first preparations with Ita Wegman and Gunther Wachsmuth, and generations of practitioners and authors (Wistinghausen, Maria Thun, Pierre Masson, Walter Stappung) developed their making and use into the detailed practice that applies today. The Demeter association grew out of the movement.

Context

Steiner's work is extensive and debated. His agricultural indications come from his spiritual-scientific worldview and are not derived from scientific research, a point that attracts both criticism and admiration to this day. This lexicon therefore reports his terms as the original concepts of the method and places them in context; it does not present them as established laws of nature and does not proselytise. Steiner's historical impact is undisputed: without the Agriculture Course there would be neither the biodynamic movement nor, through it, important impulses for organic farming as a whole.