Research is not confined to an ivory tower. It thrives where farmers and scientists connect. These research communities not only yield valuable insights but also help protect the planet. Where practice and theory come together, we come closest to the truth and can present it in a way that others can understand.
Eduardo Rincón: I want to take you back to your childhood. Remember when you were standing next to the dinner table, and your mother said, “Sit down.” And you said, “Why?” “Because you have to eat your soup.” Why? “Because there are farmers working very hard to produce these vegetables.” I don’t want to eat my vegetables. And your mother says, “Well, if you don’t eat your vegetables, you will not be able to acquire knowledge of different things in the world.” And right there, you had your first choice for doing research: you don’t eat the soup and get in real trouble, you eat the soup and forget about research, or you ask, “What did my mother mean by that?” and become a researcher.
Everything that we know in science, in the world, and especially in anthroposophy, begins with research. This was known in the past. Those working in religion in ancient times—the alchemist, the hierophant, the shaman, some priests—were doing research about the spiritual world, living in their contemporary world. Many pioneers of farming were priests or nuns, living on sacred sites, combining farming with prayer and spiritual work. When we conduct research, we ultimately surrender to the mystery of existence. The mystery schools arose out of the longing of humanity to find out why. Anthroposophy is also a mystery school—it is a path of knowledge that we walk of our own free will to delve deeply into what life is about.
So our hope for research is to unite different fields—to invite conventional researchers to work with us, and farmers to work with us, and to create a community of people who are on this quest. I am happy to say that steps towards this idea have already been taken. Last year, our third biodynamic research conference was held in the UK. It was open invitation and many different research approaches were represented. Building on this experience, we are establishing a network designed to connect researchers with one another. Jean-Michel Florin, my predecessor as co-leader of the Section, and his colleagues laid the groundwork for this idea. We are now developing it further, including on our website. Anyone with a practical problem or looking for a research partner should be able to find the right contacts quickly. The system is under development, and we are excited about this progress. We therefore warmly welcome four partners from this network to our interdisciplinary research forum.
Connecting With Like-Minded People
Julia Wright: Thank you. I work at Coventry University in the UK, at the Centre for Water Ecology and Resilience. Research can be a lonely endeavour, especially when we research alongside colleagues who have different worldviews and values. In this case, intellectual exchange and recognition of our work’s value are often lacking, and a cultural aloneness can set in. Some time ago, in the 1990s, I was working in Peru at an international research centre. I was possibly the only person interested in permaculture and organic farming—others would mock me about my views. Because I was an English-speaker, I was often asked to edit information. The organization was doing research with a major potato chip manufacturer in the U.S. that was funding a project for Peruvian farmers to grow and supply for export. I had deleted the word “nutritious” from some of their promotional materials about the value of chips, and for this, I was reprimanded and sent to the Director General’s office. Fortunately, the DG agreed with me. In another situation, while a student at an agricultural university, I suggested in the university’s newsletter that it could at least offer an organic food option in its cafeterias. This time, I was summoned into the Vice Chancellor’s office to be told, “Next time you have these kinds of ideas, just come to me and we’ll have a private chat about it. Don’t try to publish it.” Even at my current research centre, I have encountered some unfavourable reactions to my research from some colleagues in the past. I’ve been reflecting on these times—you kind of have to duck and dive in more conventional institutions, even when we are working with colleagues with similar goals like health, harmony, and good quality food.
I don’t work in the inner core of biodynamic research but in an outer circle with other alternative researchers in different sectors. There’s an increasing number of like-minded disciplines, organisations, and practitioners who are and could be allies—not only in the agricultural sciences, but in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Some of these disciplines have emerged only in the last ten years. When I was undertaking farming research years ago, I hadn’t heard of transpersonal psychology, agroecology, sonochemistry, consciousness studies, quantum biology, plant neurobiology, ethnobotany, and paranthropology. There are researchers in these fields whom we can and do collaborate with. I’ve found that they’re really interested because most of them haven’t heard of biodynamic farming, and it gives them new material to work with.
People working on indigenous studies and ethnobotany are particularly interested because they understand different worldviews from the Western one of the science of the Age of Enlightenment. They have studied and understand different ways of seeing the world, different knowledge systems. There’s a lot of research now in geography, psychology, and the humanities, looking at the idea of interspecies communication, as an example. Professor M.J. Barrett from the University of Saskatchewan leads international conferences on intuitive interspecies communication, with research results being presented from around the world. There’s a new discipline now called More-than-Human Participatory Research. Another researcher doing particularly interesting work is Monica Gagliano at the University of Southern Cross in Australia. She’s leading the Biological Intelligence Lab down there, looking at plant cognition.
When I saw the title of this conference, the first things that came into my mind were the plant and nature spirits and the rest of nature world. We work in collaboration with other beings. That is a huge comfort. In my own work, I feel I get supported not just by other like-minded humans, but by strange “coincidences” that happen. I feel it isn’t just me doing this—when we’re in this flow, we get support from the human and the other-than-human.
Letting Go of the Past
Cyrille Rigolot: I’m an agronomist in France and, like many of my research colleagues, became very committed to sustainability transformations. There is something happening in research right now: many of us feel the urge to act for biodiversity and diversity between humans, and to care for each other. About five years ago, I started doing research in biodynamic and livestock farming. I told my colleagues that we could learn something from biodynamics if we want to transform to sustainability. So biodynamic farming became not only a subject of research for us, but a source of inspiration in the way we do research: with more intuition, for example. But at that point, we began to receive many attacks, initiated by people who don’t like biodynamic and anthroposophy. These attacks were huge and surprising for us. They generated a lot of pressure on us, but also a lot of attention. Now the question is, how can we transform this attention into a transformative force in the world at scale? It’s not the same as five years ago. We have to find something else. And I have to tell you, I really don’t know what to do next.
However, I have a source of inspiration in Otto Scharmer. He grew up on a biodynamic farm, and he developed this wonderful Theory U, which is used around the world for transformation. A key moment in his life was seeing the family’s biodynamic farm burn down in front of his eyes. It was an experience of a real letting go of the past and the coming of a greater future into the stage.
So for our project, after the attacks, we took a first step. One of my colleagues in France contacted researchers working on biodynamic farming—farmers, advisors, artists, and different people—and we created a new association. Now we have this potential: we have the attention, we have our association, and we have the inspiration of Otto Scharmer. The key is our ability to really let go and connect with other initiatives. It is true for all of biodynamics: we have to let go of some patterns. If we manage to do that and connect with other communities doing the same, then we can create a new space for transformational change to emerge at scale. Maybe we have made the first step. It is an invitation for all of us, as part of this community of farmers and researchers, to connect more deeply beyond our differences and beyond the wounds of the past. We have to make this effort, this gesture of love, of coming closer and together. If we do, we will find our way, I’m sure.
Understanding Outsiders
Christopher Brock: I am a research coordinator at Demeter Germany within the Forschungsring, one of the few institutes worldwide focused on biodynamic agriculture. I organize research for Demeter in Germany and facilitate research activities for the biodynamic community globally. So I network a lot. And I wondered: if all farmers are researchers, what role do we play as scientists? Farmers do a kind of peasant research based on experience, comparison, intuition, and exchange with fellow farmers. In this way, they acquire knowledge, find new insights, and develop new techniques. This is the foundation of farming. What we do as academic researchers is based on systematic and logical analysis. It is a way of looking at things to identify questions and design studies that lead towards the solution of a problem.
This is very important if we consider the target audience. For example, you can do preparation work on your farms. You have a personal relation to the preparations—you have an idea of how they work and why they are important. This is sufficient to apply them and make them a meaningful part of farming. But we often struggle to communicate to those outside the community who question these strange preparations made from cow horns with manure in them, for example. Research can help us study the preparations in a way that is comprehensible to the target audience. If we want to convince them, we need to use a language that they understand.
As a research coordinator, my most important question is how we, as scientific researchers, can support the biodynamic movement. It’s easy to find an interesting question and study whether, for instance, the preparations sprayed on a certain day improve vitamin B. But this may not be the most relevant information for the community. So it’s very important for me to interact with the farmers and all the people in the movement to find out: is this something where research can help support development? Sometimes, after we start, we find out that the original question was not really the research question.
Here’s an example from my favorite project, when I was quite new in my position. The German Demeter beekeepers came to me and said: “We need research on the excluder—the barrier placed in the hive to prevent the queen from laying eggs in the honey—to decide whether it should be allowed in beekeeping or not. Please do research so we have good information for making our decision.” The first question for me was: what information is actually needed to make that decision? So we formed a group—beekeepers, researchers with specific expertise, and myself as coordinator. Some wanted to know about the effect on bee vitality, honey quality, and labour. We asked, “What does honey quality mean?” Some suggested that we measure things like water content. Others said, “No, this is not food quality; we would like to have a more holistic method.” We suggested using picture forming methods—that’s a good idea. But they asked, “Isn’t there more? From an anthropological perspective, we would also like to have an analysis of formative forces.” Okay, we included that. So, we designed research to provide the information that was demanded by the beekeepers. Since we sat together in this process to find out what our question was, the beekeepers felt it was their project too, not just something the Forschungsring found out. One excellent result of this was the publication of an article in a scientific journal, which really appreciated our transdisciplinary approach, and the beekeepers were listed as co-authors. In the end, the beekeepers realized that all those questions were not their basic question—it was: what should Demeter beekeeping look like? The research project helped them find out their real question.
I think that scientific research could be seen as a craft in the biodynamic village, which can, together with all the other crafts, can really help the movement to develop, evolve, and flourish.
Become a Researcher in the “BioRegEater” Project
David Martin: I was born in the US, moved to France when I was seven, and the school there involved a farm. I learned that there are many more kinds of intelligence than those I was proud of that enabled me to go to medical school. I studied medicine in Germany and became an endocrinologist—a specialist for hormones and cancer. When you first study medicine, you feel it is so powerful. We can do so much with these methods that we’ve developed in the last hundred years—it’s incredible. We can now heal 70 to 80% of all children with cancer. But then you start wondering why we have more and more children with cancer, with endocrine diseases, with Type 1 diabetes. It’s not increasing linearly—in some places it’s increasing exponentially. What has changed in the last hundred years? One of the main things that has changed is the way we do agriculture.
Eight years ago, Silke Schwarz and I founded the Future of Childhood Think Tank. We listed all the things where we felt that something was going wrong. Farming was on the list. So was the way we build towns, schools, and kindergartens. But digital media was top of the list. We created another think tank for that and said, we’re not interested in just researching—we want to research in a way that the research makes a difference. We invented something we called “Media Fasting” and tested it with 1500 families through pediatricians. Then we realized we have to start earlier. So we developed “Screen Free ‘Til Three.” We went to 11 foundations and got the money to do this with 2580 pediatricians in Germany, each of whom sees about 1500 children. They were actually very happy because they were seeing the problem. This is a problem that you farmers will soon be the solution for, because we don’t have enough therapists to deal with all the screen damage we’re causing. We need nature as a co-therapist, a co-educator. Studies show that already at the age of 6 to 8 months, the time children spend in nature is positively correlated with their development. We then got government funding to do a follow-up project from 3 to 6 years of age.
Now I want to invite everyone who is asking, “What can I do now, today, for a better world?” to join me in a new kind of fasting. This is not media fasting. It is BioRegEating: trying to eat only organic or regenerative food, so that you’re regenerating the soil. Yes, it’s more expensive. But you’re paying for the next generation to have a good world—if not, you’re living at the cost of the next generation. So we buy food that we know is good for the earth, that makes our landscape beautiful and diverse, and that helps people who are growing it because they believe in it. It’s helping love of the earth. Next week in Germany, the traditional time for fasting begins, and it lasts till Easter. I’d like to not be alone. Become an action researcher with me. Become a BioRegEater! Thank you.
More Goetheanum Section for Agriculture, You Never Farm Alone. Talks from the conference are available for viewing on: GoetheanumTV.
Title image From left: Eduardo Rincón, Christopher Brock, Cyrille Rigolot, Julia Wright, David Martin. Photo: Xue Li
