The early history of Biodynamics

I recently stumbled across this article: John Paull, Biodynamic agriculture: The journey from Koberwitz to the world, 1924-1938, Journal of Organic Systems, 6(1), 2011.  I cannot say how accurate it is, but it certainly seems to give a good overview of the early history of Biodynamics and I thought wine geeks might be interested.

Before reading the article, I did not realise how keen Steiner was to have his ideas tested experimentally.  I was aware there were early experiments that seemed to use crop size as the measure of success, but I wonder if those were the experiments encouraged by Steiner or if he didn’t rather have different ideas about what the outcomes should be.

Another thing I found interesting were the various early requests to restrict the spreading of the knowledge of Biodynamics.  It is something I have noticed even with modern practitioners – that the knowledge tends to be passed on from person to person rather than be published freely.  Books are of course now available, but there is surprisingly little freely available on the interweb.  I imagined that Biodynamics would be something that was openly shared evangelistically, but apparently not.  The culture is more of passing on hard-earned precious knowledge for monetary gain.  Maybe that is not such a bad thing, but I am not sure.  If you knew something so important, wouldn’t you want to let everyone know?

Author: Steve Slatcher

Wine enthusiast

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