Six stories of farming and trade, inspired by the vision of individuals, the courage of the few, and the power of the many.
Ueli Hurter: These six people are heroes. They stepped into the unknown; they did something no one had done before. This is not rethinking economic activity; it’s redoing economic activity.
Alice Groh comes from the farm that pioneered CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).
Alice Groh: You need to want the farm, not just the farm products. My husband, Trauger Groh, said that again and again to our community members. You must realize the value of the farm for the environment and the community as a whole. When we started, we had no bank to finance us. So we put together a budget for the running costs of the farm for one year and presented it to our community members. The budget is the footprint of our intentions. If you see it in the budget, that means we mean to do it. Then we all sat in a circle, and each member pledged an amount, which took a lot of courage because we all knew each other. So one family pledged $200 a month, and another family pledged $150 a month, and so on. Our vegetable farmer and bookkeeper, Anthony Graham, would add up the numbers and tell us if we met our budget. And if not, we went around again until we did.
I think the most important thing was that Trauger was constantly speaking about the ideals of biodynamics and social ideals, and that inspired people. That’s what kept the enthusiasm for our farm. We are now going into our 40th season. It’s very impressive that CSA, as a concept, is so widely known. It’s not often that a social idea comes to the earth and really takes root and spreads from its initial impulse. We are all farmers. We’re all taking responsibility for how our food is grown and the effect of our biodynamic farm in the ecological environment. We have to learn to read our social environment in the same way that we read our natural and agricultural environment, and see what is possible.
Olivier Clisson, from France, takes this one step further. He is what they call in France a Paysan Boulanger—a farmer and a baker.
Olivier: This year, it’s 30 years of anthroposophy and 20 years of biodynamic farming for me! What kept my farm running for 20 years? Associative economics. It is very simple. They need you, and we need them. But in today’s economy, it’s the opposite. They are the enemy, and we want to get as much money as we can from them. And they want to get the cheapest price. It’s just stupid.
It all started for me when I needed money to build the bread oven. I asked a small bank in France with an anthroposophic background. They said, “Okay, but you have to find ten people to sign a document saying: we will guarantee Olivier’s loan.” So I went to some people who wanted local food. Never met them before. After an hour of explaining my project, they all signed the document. With that, I couldn’t fail. When I had difficult times on the farm, I thought of them: they put their faith in me, so I can’t let them down.
When I had the opportunity to get more land, I asked my consumers, “Would you like to buy the land with me?” So we got help from Terre du Liens in France to build our local co-op. Now I could get my first cows! And guess what? I asked my consumers to buy them. We couldn’t divide up a cow, so one cow, one consumer, and I “rented” the cow from them.
When we were fighting against GMOs, the Swiss had the idea of inviting people to farms for a collective seed sowing event. We did that, and I have to say, it’s one of the most beautiful days of my farming life. Enthusiasm is incredibly powerful. When someone asked Rudolf Steiner if we could build machines to stir the preparations, he said: Light can improve medicines, so why not enthusiasm? Maybe that’s what biodynamics is all about: connections, with nature and our invisible friends, with ourselves and the divine in us, and with the others and all the golden hearts present in this room.
Andreas Milan comes from Colombia. In Latin America, the success of biodynamic growing depends on access to the market, but the big markets are closed to these growers.
Andreas: We needed our own strategy for building local markets. The main lesson is simple: for biodynamic agriculture, the economy cannot be separated from community. Economic activity is not just about selling or producing products. We are sharing values and developing new relationships.
Competition and short-term profitability do not work well for biodynamic producers. We want to add value to the products. There is no economic sustainability without social cohesion and environmental regeneration. When we act as a network, we share stories, we share experiences, and we become resilient. We found common challenges even though we came from different backgrounds, different countries. These challenges can’t be solved by one of us. They have to be solved by all of us. Everyone has to become a hero.
We found several strategies. First: experience comes before explanation. Taste, vitality, and real stories communicate better than concepts. It means we have to go meet the customer and understand their needs. The customer is not a customer anymore: they are now our friend and belong to our community. Second: a shared regional narrative is essential. Biodynamics must be visible as a Latin American movement. Third: customer education is part of economic activity. We need to share our knowledge and educate our community. Finally: regional cooperation is key to expanding product availability and diversity. It should involve our neighboring countries. Even if global trends go for food with meaning, transparency, and regenerative impact, the real opportunity for biodynamics is to deepen coherence and grow and develop communities.
Merle Koomans brings an initiative from the Netherlands called CSS: Consumer Supported Shops.
Merles: Odin is a food co-op in the Netherlands. We have 40 shops, all owned by a cooperative. We can all be heroes—you can all become a member and be a hero at Odin! With every euro you spend in the shop, you decide what the world looks like, what the food chain looks like. At the moment, about 23,000 households own Odin. Last year we had about €100 million turnover, which is nice, but it’s not a goal. We try to make money to create more change in the world.
We also do beekeeping—not for honey but for biodiversity. We have about 75 bee colonies on about 30 biodynamic farms in the Netherlands. We use the bees to tell the story about what’s going wrong. Because if a bee dies, then everybody says, “Oh no, the bees are dying.” But if people get sick from pesticides, we don’t do this. We also have a biodynamic farm. The main goal is open-pollinated breeding. We grow vegetables and invite people to look and learn what’s important about GMO-free seeds and where your food comes from.
I’m not really a person to go on the streets. But things are changing in the world, and sometimes you have to go a little bit out of your comfort zone. So I went protesting against the regulation of GMOs and against the regulation for pesticides in the Netherlands. I think it’s good that we don’t just sell food and make connections with people about food, but that we get more active when things really go wrong. On our T-shirts, we say “be the change you wish to see.”
In Italy, Fabio Brescacin and NaturaSi take it further. Last year, they started huge, countrywide public campaigns.
Fabio: We started 40 years ago with a small cooperative in a little town near Venice. After two years, we started a small farm. Now we are living in one of the most polluted areas in Europe, the Prosecco area. But we have a 25-hectare oasis where there is no pollution. Our inspiration was anthroposophy, and we had a mission: healthy agriculture, biodynamic agriculture. That is not possible without a healthy economy. So 20 years ago, we decided to use the value that we create in the company for spiritual things, for cultural things.
Today we have 350 shops. After 30 years, the consumers are there, the consciousness is there. The crops are healthy. But at the end of the year, the balance sheet is red. We asked ourselves, how can we arrive at the right price? Last year, we started a campaign with big posters saying Prezzo Transparente: support agriculture with transparent prices! We tried it with several products. It was not easy for our people: isn’t price something secret? No, we have to be open!
Price is a community decision. So the second thing was a round table with institutions, farming organizations, consumer organizations, to discuss price, not to decide the price, but to have a benchmark. Today, people are buying at market price, and it is a stupid price. We need money. We have to take money from this huge financial world, which is like a blood flow, and take some drops for our farm, for agriculture. I think the consumers are ready to do it. So, we are working this year on pilot equity and loans for the farms and the supply chain.
Egoism is only one part of mankind. For 2000 years, there has been another impulse, getting stronger every day. This is altruism. Rudolf Steiner says that economy is the education of altruism. I think that the task of people who are inspired by anthroposophy is this Christus impulse in economy. We need to give people the possibility to do good.
Tom Saat brings us another situation. We have organic shops that we built up out of the biodynamic movement over the last 40 to 50 years. At the same time, we are surrounded by super shops. There too, organic and biodynamic goods are wanted. It’s a different ground. How can we partner with these big retail enterprises in a way that we are not taken as naive, but that we can cultivate another world of consumers?
Tom: When I started as a farmer, at the beginning of the 90s, there was a fast-growing number of organic and biodynamic farms, and about 80% of food was bought in the supermarket. It seemed obvious that if you sell your farm products, you should look into that. But it was not so easy to be “at the same table” with these big retailers.
However, in the last decade, things have changed. Because of the Corporate Sustainable Reporting Directive from the Green Deal, companies with over 10,000 employees have to report their sustainability records. And Greenpeace, which is active all over Europe, puts a lot of pressure on supermarkets to sell healthy products. So many of the supermarkets not only have a purchasing department but also a sustainability department. This makes it much more interesting for us to be at the table. We can talk on the same level—producers, packers, washers, the sustainability department, and the commercial departments.
But you won’t find the consumer at this table. Most consumers enter a supermarket thinking they are free to choose what they want to buy. This is an illusion. I have gone through a shop so many times with supermarket managers, and they will tell you: “If I put your onions or broccoli here, it will sell this much in a week. If I put it there, it will be that much.” To a large extent, the supermarket management determines what the consumer buys, which is a good reason not to have them at the table. But it’s getting better. I see these things as a stepping stone: a change that won’t go backward because, for example, sustainability is on the table right now and we have to make a profit from it.
If we want to be an important part of the whole landscape of agriculture, we have to go this way. There are six of us here, and we all, especially Fabio, of course, want to go to Rome. There are many ways to get to Rome. The best is when they are fruitful for each other. So my point is that the supermarkets should also be part of the growth.
These are lightly edited excerpts from talks given at the 2026 Agriculture Conference at the Goetheanum. The full talk is available for viewing on GoetheanumTV.
More Goetheanum Section for Agriculture, You Never Farm Alone.
