Workshop Session E

The production of Biodynamic grains, pulses, and oilseeds is not keeping up with the demand in the marketplace. Challenges to expanding acres of Biodynamic production include:

- Lack of knowledge to scale Biodynamic practices across larger acreages, and to manage these farms as individual organisms

- Inadequate mechanisms for equitable risk-sharing relationships between farmers and the rest of the supply chain that are truly cooperative (versus competitive)

The social understanding of gender and sexuality is a task for our times. Rudolf Steiner stated that our gender and sexuality are where the human being is most un-free. Our farms, educational opportunities, social and business enterprises, and communities at large are calling for renewed relationships where the capacities of each individual are honored and supported to develop no matter their gender, sexuality, race, culture, or religion. We will explore how the qualities of gender and sexuality live in us and ways to develop ourselves towards freedom from their bounds.

Rudolf Steiner intended to inaugurate a rational and scientific, as well as spiritual, method of agriculture. In the first four lectures of his Agriculture Course, he outlined the spiritual-scientific foundations for the biodynamic preparations at the heart of this new method of agriculture. Unless these foundations are understood, the preparations will remain a riddle. We will review these initial lectures with their many difficult-to-understand details and uncover the systematic principles contained in Steiner's highly condensed indications.

Join us for an introduction to Dr. Ehrenfeid Pfeiffer's Round Filter Chromatography and the Soil Food Web by Dr. Elaine Ingham. This workshop will cover the importance of the beneficial aerobic soil organisms, to build and maintain fertile, healthy, vibrant soils and composts. How can we use and integrate Round Filter Chromatography and the Soil Food Web, Fungal to Bacterial biomass ratios (F:B ratio) as a quality control tool to assess soil and compost?

This workshop will provide people who are early on in their exploration of biodynamics with a clear and lingo-free understanding of the spiritual-scientific background to biodynamics and how these insights inform biodynamic principles and practices. Though biodynamics can be successfully practiced by anyone, with or without this knowledge, this background is necessary to understand why biodynamics works and to distinguish it from a religious belief system.

This workshop will explore the relationship between biodynamics and permaculture and what each of these concepts offer. We will look at how these concepts are different and how they are similar. What can they learn from each other? We will look at how the realms of biodynamics (etheric, astral, and spiritual) relate to the concepts of zones in permaculture and how they intersect. We will also discuss systems theory and how it informs and inspires both permaculture and biodynamics. This will not be a “how to” workshop.

This workshop will discuss how to emulate nature to develop an intimate relationship with a piece of land. This is done by evaluating amd monitoring all components of the given ecosystem. The idea is to enhance the symbiotic relationship amongst the various species. Finding one's place in the ecosystem allows coexistence and adapatability with the gardener or farmer. In other words, the garden makes the gardener.