Workshop Session B

We will take a visual tour of a year of landscape gardening and talk about how to integrate biodynamic practices into each month of the growing season. Including early season greenhouse use (seeding, sequential spraying, the importance of equisetum), calendar use throughout the season, pruning and tree pasting, spraying biodynamic preparations on multiple locations, transplanting, cultivation, harvest, and composting. This lecture will explore ways to merge our biodynamic methods with an industry that is often given to the use of herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers.

Goodfoot Farm is a small-scale, certified organic and Biodynamic® market farm in Western Oregon. In addition to blueberries, tree fruits, and diversified vegetable production, the farm is home to flocks of chickens and geese, several sheep, and three horses. In this workshop, farmer Beth will discuss the role of animals on a Biodynamic farm and explore how each of these species is put to work on her farm managing weeds, insect pests, and diseases, and providing fertility.

In this session, we will share information about our Yahowt ("Lift us up, togethe"r in the Coast Salish Lushootseed language) Program. The program includes both a multi-year, multi-generational permaculture cohort who earn professional certifications and design and implement foods and restoration projects in the Native community, and the Indigenous Foods program that utilizes mostly public lands in the Seattle area to increase access and facilitate re-connection to healthy vegetables and traditional foods.

In an ideal world, everyone would know their farmer, all food would be healthy and wholesome, and all land would be treated with respect. In our current legal, economic, and agricultural landscape, this is unfortunately very untrue, and certification plays an important role in creating standards for how farms are managed and the food is processed, and verifying that these standards have been met.

This workshop will connect the spiritual and scientific dimensions of the work of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) and George Washington Carver (1860-1943), who were contemporaries and held very similar views about very similar work. We will connect Carver's work to the conference themes of living soil, agricultural traditions and innovations, and community, economics, and justice, and discuss why it is important for the US biodynamic movement to embrace and study Carver as an important step towards embracing diversity and connecting with other strands of biodynamic thought.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, our hydrologic cycles have a dual nature of winter rainforest and summer desert. Forest management, suburbanization, and climate change have exacerbated this feast-or-famine dynamic with water availability. The Keyline water plan developed by P.A.

This workshop will describe and show the different key aspects considered in biodynamic production in Germany and development of the biodynamic approach in farms from Mexico and Guatemala. As key aspects for crop production are considered soil fertility and health, plant nutrition, biological control, irrigation systems, co-workers happiness, biodynamic greenhouse production, bio-preparations application, and effect on the whole system.

In 2016 biodynamic agriculture was introduced to the Kenyan smallholder tea and coffee farmers by the Organic Agriculture Center of Kenya (OACK), with support from Demeter International and the GLS Treuhand. The trainers have been Anne and Rolf Bucher from Germany. Farmers viewed biodynamic farming as rescuing them from the day-to-day challenges they face as a result of industrial farming, which has caused anxiety and uncertainty, leaving communities more vulnerable, as everything has become commercialized and inauthentic.

In the biodynamic community, the 2011 publication of Voodoo Vintners: Oregon’s Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers, was seen as a mixed blessing. On one hand, Katherine Cole's excellent writing captured fascinating and unique stories of a dozen Biodynamic practitioners and presented core principles and practices of biodynamics in an approachable way. On the other hand, the title served to underline and reemphasize prevalent perceptions of biodynamics as occult and unscientific. Seven years later, what has changed in the vineyard, the winery, and public perception?

"Protecting the source, inspiring the future" In this workshop, Michael will give an introduction to "Apis Arborea" and share innovative gestures within the biodynamic field of apiculture — among them the framework of an indigenous, arboreal apiculture and LocApiary, a vision of a local watershed apiary. Rewilding and the restoration of natural honeybee nest habitat are part of an effort to further develop a biodynamic paradigm of apiculture. In this context, we will also evaluate the international Demeter Standard for Beekeeping in a historic critical context.