AGRICULTURE ABRIDGED

Rudolph Steiner's 1924 Course

Jeff Poppen, Hugh Lovell

• Publisher: Jeff Poppen, Barefoot Farmer
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780578930688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

The origin of the organic food and farming movement can be traced back to Rudolph Steiner's ten day course on agriculture. Because of its inevitable, detrimental effect on human health, Dr. Steiner rejected the recently introduced, artificial nitrogen fertilizers and recommended a return to traditional methods for farm fertility along with ways to enhance them. This abridged version of his agriculture course in everyday language simplifies biodynamics for beginners.

Lessons From Old Agricultural Textbooks

An Introduction To Soil

How Soils Form—Over time, rocks decay into soil and soil hardens into rocks. Soil is forming all the time. Long ago, revolving stars and gasses eventually condensed and became our solar system and planet with its rocks and then soil.

The forces weathering rocks into soil today are heat (volcanic activity), cold (frost and ice), wind, water and gasses (oxygen and carbon dioxide working chemically). Once formed it is called sedimentary soil. Soil is not stable but can wash downhill, called alluvial soil, or be blown about by the wind and is then called loess soil. Life depends on soil and its care is the farmer’s primary concern.

Soil particles vary in size. The biggest ones are grains of sand. Sand is quartz, a combination of silicon and oxygen called silica. One half of the earth’s crust is silica, so it obviously plays an important role in farming.

The smallest soil grains are clay. When you rub soil between your fingers, the gritty, rough portions are sand and the smooth, sticky portions are clay. Silt is somewhere in the middle and feels velvety. A grain of clay can be a hundred times smaller than a grain of sand.

Sandy soils drain well because of their course texture. Although they warm up quickly in the spring and are loose, they lack essential minerals and thus fertility. Finely textured clay soils hold moisture, minerals and fertility, but are cold and compact when moist, and turn hard when dry. As the best soils are a combination, it is good to add clay to sandy soils and sand to clay soils.

Any substance formed by plants or animals is called organic matter, which differs from the mineral matter in that it comes from life. The life in the soil is in the decaying plant and animal portions of the soil. Humus refers to the black, waxy complex substance coating the soil grains that is made from the decaying organic matter.

It takes soil microbes, starting with bacteria and fungi, to turn organic matter into humus. Soils well supplied with humus are the easiest to farm. The farmer’s concern for the soil quickly turns to care for certain soil microorganisms. Good farming practices promote the life in the soil.

Glaciers played a significant role in powdering rocks and leaving deposits of organic matter. This made for the great black soils of the midwest. The southeast did not get any recent glacial activity and has some of the oldest, most eroded soils in the world. Except for alluvial soils along flood plains where soil from upstream is deposited, most soils in the southeast must be improved before farmers can grow crops successfully.

Improving Soil—As observation is a key to learning, closely comparing a handful of rich garden soil with one from a worn out field can teach us a lot. The garden soil, with its additions of organic matter and minerals, will be dark and crumbly, while the worn out soil will be lighter in color and compact. The difference is that the former has humus.

Lichens and mosses are the first plants to grow on newly weathered rocks. As they grow, acids leaching out from their roots further decay the rocks, slowly creating and improving the soil. Higher forms of plants can then grow and the process of improving soil slowly continues.

Animals eventually enter the picture, eating plants and excreting. Their waste products speed up the soil improvement process. Acids in these wastes continue dissolving the minerals in the rocks which then become nutrients for further plant growth.

Worn out soil can be made into good garden soil, but only plants can do it, and they need the help of animals. Another difference is one we can’t see, and that is the number of living organisms that can only be seen with a microscope. A spoon full of garden soil can have billions of these microbes, where the worn out soil has just a few million, or 1,000 times less.

Farmers rest their worn out fields by sowing them back into grass and clover. The immense network of the grass roots subdivides the cloddy soil into smaller crumbs, and the clover roots dive deeper down and bring air into the soil. You may have noticed that good soil has air pockets in it, while worn out soil does not.

The life in the soil, just like you, needs air to breathe. Air is made of the elements nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Both plants and animals cannot live without these important elements. As the sod grows, it opens up the soil so air can enter. Nitrogen is usually the limiting factor in plant growth and other chemical reactions, and oxygen is necessary for combining with the mineral elements so they can be of use. Plants incorporate the element carbon into the soil through photosynthesis, which is the process of converting the carbon dioxide in the air into the carbohydrates in the plant.

When the soil is open, water can enter instead of running off. Water is a combination of two elements, hydrogen and oxygen. Careful tillage opens the soil, but too much will damage the precious soil life. The water and air in the vicinity of a plant’s leaves and roots are the source of the four free elements: nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon. Farmers do not have to add these when they routinely recover their cropland with a grass and clover sod.

Another great asset of grass and clover is that cows, sheep and goats love to eat them. Their stomachs contain different microbes which end up in the soil and help it get better. These animals are called ruminants, and are capable of improving soil even while living off the plants grown there.

Many other smaller animals help as well. Ants bring to the surface the finest sand. Earthworms make channels and take organic matter from the surface deeper into the soil, pulverizing it as they go. Birds, reptiles and mammals are all poking around the soil, moving minerals and organic matter around, and leaving valuable soil-building wastes behind.

The acids in plant roots and animal wastes continually help decay rocks and release mineral nutrients. The major mineral nutrients are the elements silica, calcium, potassium and phosphorus. Other minor but vital elements are sulfur, magnesium, iron, aluminum, sodium, copper, zinc, manganese, molybdenum, cobalt, chlorine and boron. These are known as the trace elements. Most soils contain enough of the major and trace elements, in an unavailable, insoluble form, to grow abundant crops for thousands of years, with the possible exception of phosphorous. If a soil is deficient in a major or minor element, farmers need to add it.

By spreading substances with calcium, magnesium and potassium, such as lime and wood ashes, a chemical reaction occurs. These bases react with the acids to speed up the soil improvement process and release of nutrients. They are necessary for the growth of legumes, which is the family of plants clover belongs to.

Once the nutrients are released from their parent materials, the rocks, they can be leached out and washed away when it rains. We need microbes to incorporate loose nutrients into their bodies to prevent leaching, and now we see why the life in the soil is so important.

Farmers do many different things to make the land fertile and in good tilth. These things don’t work as well by themselves. By growing grass and clover, raising livestock and spreading compost, wood ashes and rock dusts, farmers take great care of the life in the soil so they can grow healthy crops.

Compost—We’ve seen how nature slowly builds soil, how plants and animals help, and the necessity of life in the soil to release and then hold the nutrients. Putting all of this information together helps us understand why farmers make compost. This is where the microbes grow, reproduce, and form humus.

The grass and clover which a cow eats stays in her stomach (of which she has four) for over two weeks. It undergoes great changes there and comes out teeming with life and the possibility of fertilizing the soil. But life is fleeting and can go away quickly.

When you smell manure, you are smelling ammonia gas, a combination of nitrogen and hydrogen, which is leaving the manure and going back into the air. Farmers stop this waste by adding bedding, some carbon material like old hay or straw, to the manure. Now the nitrogen has somewhere it would rather be, because it loves carbon.

The third ingredient to the compost pile, besides the carbon material and manure, is soil. Soil has clay in it that aids in the production of the clay/humus complex we want our soils to become. Soil also has a different set of microbes, and we will soon see why “the more the merrier” is the theme for the microorganisms in the compost pile.

Sometimes farmers add a fourth ingredient, rock dusts. These are mineral-rich, ground up rocks from different regions of the United States. Granite, rock phosphate, greensand and other rock dusts add valuable minerals which the microbes digest and release in a more readily available form.

Compost is often made where the farm’s livestock are fed. During spring, summer and fall, the livestock are moved frequently to different pastures to graze and fertilize the soil. The other pastures grow back with no animals on them. Hay is made when the grass grows quicker than they can eat it, usually in May and September.

Farmers harrow in the droppings and surface organic matter after the animals leave a paddock. This creates sheet composting that happens right in the field. During winter the hay is fed to the cows, and in those places we have the three ingredients for making compost; hay, manure and soil. The soil there has also been peed on, and the urine of livestock is every bit as valuable as the manure.

Many different species of fungi live in the forest, so adding leaves to the compost pile is beneficial. It’s better if they are chopped up or decayed, as they will tend to pack in layers otherwise. After wood chips have sat for five or ten years, they will be decayed enough to benefit the compost pile. If they still resemble wood chips, they have too much carbon and any nitrogen will be used to further their decay, rather than for growing crops.

In the old days with a pitchfork, and now with a front-end loader, loose piles were made and moistened so the ingredients could ferment together. The compost pile will get warm and break down the materials so that in a year nothing original will be recognizable. Although some nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium will be directly available when the compost is spread, the real benefit is the untold number of microbes, ready to go to work improving the soil for the next crop.

How Plants Grow—A seed contains stored up nutrition. It will either be eaten by an animal or human, or...

Table of contents

• Half-Title
• Full-Title
• Text Insert
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction To Biodynamics
• Chapter
• Excerpts From Steiner's Report
• Lecture One
• Lecture Two
• Lecture Three
• Address
• Lecture Four
• Discussion
• Lecture Five
• Discussion
• Lecture Six
• Discussion
• Lecture Seven
• Lecture Eight
• Discussion
• Text Insert
• Appendix: Lessons From Old Agricultural Textbooks
• Text Insert
• Lessons From Old Agricultural Textbooks
• Chapter
• Afterword
• Text Insert