Agriculture and Social Health: Empowering Each Other to Live Well in Our Tasks

The role of agriculture is central to healthy community life, and to helping new forms of community to grow. In the face of many challenges, we must find new ways of working together as colleagues and co-workers, mentors and apprentices, teachers and students. As we strive to meet each other as individuals, regardless of age, race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, culture, or social or economic status, a new exploration of social health is emerging.              

Event Type: 
pre-conference workshop
Date: 
Wednesday
Location: 
Multnomah

In Anticipation of the 100th Anniversary of Biodynamic Agriculture, How Do We Responsibly Present its Spiritual-scientific Foundations to the World? - Part 2

As we prepare for the 100th anniversary of the Agriculture Course, the Agriculture Section of the School for Spiritual Science is hosting a pre-conference evening and morning meeting. Anyone is welcome who has experience in the practice of biodynamics, is familiar with the Agriculture Course, and feels committed to maintaining and deepening the connection of biodynamics to its source in anthroposophy.

We will address the following questions:

Event Type: 
pre-conference workshop
Date: 
Thursday
Location: 
Multnomah

In Anticipation of the 100th Anniversary of Biodynamic Agriculture, How Do We Responsibly Present its Spiritual-Scientific Foundations to the World? - Part 1

As we prepare for the 100th anniversary of the Agriculture Course, the Agriculture Section of the School for Spiritual Science is hosting a pre-conference evening and morning meeting. Anyone is welcome who has experience in the practice of biodynamics, is familiar with the Agriculture Course, and feels committed to maintaining and deepening the connection of biodynamics to its source in anthroposophy.

We will address the following questions:

Event Type: 
pre-conference workshop
Date: 
Wednesday
Location: 
Multnomah

Collaborative Strategies for the Emerging Food Economy

This workshop will focus on the potential to grow and sustain a new food economy by forging more transparent and cooperative relationships among farmers, distributors, retailers, consumers, and other stakeholders. It will highlight the work of individuals, businesses, and organizations that are successfully innovating in this realm and provide a conceptual framework for understanding and replicating these efforts, drawing on Rudolf Steiner's associative economics as well as contemporary research and development in the field of integrated supply chains.

Event Type: 
pre-conference workshop
Date: 
Thursday
Location: 
Weyerhaeuser

How Inner Development Affects Our Tasks on the Farm and in Community Life

What leads our lives? Is it our desires, our intellect — or the most aware part of us? Each of us already has certain capacities, but we need to develop them in order to be able to make use of them. Developing ourselves affects not only our own lives and the decisions we make, but also effects the lives of others around us. Through an active inner life, changes take place that evolve our inner capacities and transform our way of seeing, experiencing, and acting in the world around us.

Event Type: 
pre-conference workshop
Date: 
Thursday
Location: 
Washington

The Biodynamic Principles

We will develop a 7-principle-matrix for the biodynamic impulse which leads us from nature to the human to the social.

1. Soil - the breathing earth

2. Plants - the relation between earth and cosmos

3. Animals - the farm organism

4. Preparations - the farm individuality

5. Landscape - the cultivation of nature

6. Food - from earth, by sharing, for humans

Event Type: 
pre-conference workshop
Date: 
Thursday
Location: 
Clark

Biodynamic Beekeeping

This workshop will delve into a deep exploration of the needs and nature of the honeybee from the perspective of biodynamic beekeeping. Through beekeeping methods that honor the wisdom and instincts of the honeybees, we arrive at the great need to transform the land surrounding the bees into a place of nourishment and vitality. Biodynamically managed land has the potential to offer the honeybees a sanctuary where they can heal, grow, and eventually thrive.

Event Type: 
pre-conference workshop
Date: 
Thursday
Location: 
Clackamas

Look Up to the Sky, Before You Look Down at Your Calendar!

Before you find yourself looking only at the planting calendar, learn what the planets and constellations are really all about! Study their movements, their orbits, and their dynamic relationships. What is an eclipse? What is retrograde movement? What are the phases of the moon and the lunar rhythms? Be prepared to get out of your seat to move with eurythmy for a deepened experience.

Event Type: 
pre-conference workshop
Date: 
Thursday
Location: 
Multnomah

Advanced Biodynamics

Biodynamic preparations, along with application of the principles underlying their use, are an artist's palette of colors to create landscapes that give rise to vibrant life as well as food, fiber, and raw materials of amazing quality and abundance. Though often biodynamics is referred to as a practice, its more skilled practitioners may think of it as an art form that produces the nuttiest winter spinach; the most inspiring tarragon, basil, or ginger; the most delicious apples or cherries; and the subtlest fine wines.

Event Type: 
pre-conference workshop
Date: 
Thursday
Location: 
Crown Zellerbach

Ecosystem Mimicry in Perennial Biodynamic Systems

In his Agriculture Lectures, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly charged farmers to create a self-contained farm organism that includes the proper mix of pastures and meadows, trees and shrubs, aromatic herbs, flowers, ponds, fungi, and animals. Such a self-contained farm organism includes all of the processes in nature that create topsoil, improve fertility, and increase biodiversity, and includes ecological disturbance to re-set the system. Learn how to design your farm after the natural plant communities of your bioregion in order to obtain yields with almost as little cost as nature.

Event Type: 
pre-conference workshop
Date: 
Thursday
Location: 
Clackamas