Chelsea Green Publishers, 2024, 194 pages, $21.95
This book is not about farming without shoes! I have reviewed another book by Jeff Poppen: The Barefoot Farmer. Barefoot Farmer is Jeff’s other name. You don’t have to believe in biodynamics to enjoy this book! You can gain a lot from Jeff’s 50 years of farming experience, and his commonsense results-based approach.
Jeff acknowledges that some of Steiner’s ideas may seem strange, and reminds us that we don’t need to believe in it to benefit from trying it. Jeff’s main approach is to generously feed the soil, and use the soil amendments prescribed in the biodynamic approach. If, like me, you are curious or a bit skeptical, read this book.
In his introduction, Jeff tells us that when he first read Rudolph Steiner’s Agriculture, A Course of Eight Lectures, he found some of the ideas very relevant and important, while others made no sense to him at all! He has compassion for others who have the same impressions. He decided to try the hundred-year-old methods without belief in them, and his great results caused him to continue for 40 years, while trying to figure it all out.
Steiner’s lectures were delivered in 1924, in German, at the Technical Institute of Vienna and recorded in shorthand. This was later translated directly into English, without benefit of any explanation of his idiosyncratic terminology. Jeff collaborated with Hugh Lovel, Harvey Lisle and Hugh Courtney to form the Southeast Biodynamic Association in 1987, and Jeff started to write up his understanding of Steiner’s ideas in his own words, both for his own clarification and to help others to understand Steiner better. He used the 1993 translation by Catherine Creeger and Malcolm Gardener, and self-published the result in 2020 as Agriculture Abridged. Barefoot Biodynamics builds on that work and adds in stories from Jeff’s own farming experience to make a book for a wider audience. The book is organized around eight Fundamental Concepts, and some Guiding Lines, along with an overview of Steiner’s course.
Sandor Katz, who wrote the Foreword, and Jeff himself, have both observed that the biodynamic farms they’ve seen have been some of the most “stunning, verdant ones” to quote Katz. Whether it’s the details of the biodynamic preparations, or the fact of those farmers paying exquisite attention to what they do and their results, it is worth noting.
Jeff says that once gardening became his passion he tried everything. “Just learning how to work a full day was an accomplishment, as I still had those lazy bones common among teens.” Debby and Jeff moved to their Tennessee homestead in 1974: a simple shack, no electricity, spring water. They were part of a local back-to-the-land movement, and cooperating with the other farmers led them to appreciate local dependency over self-sufficiency, their initial motivating force. Jeff says that living off-grid without electric lights for 25 years made him more attuned to nature.
Jeff’s very productive Long Hungry Creek Farm includes 3 miles each of potatoes and winter squash rows; 2 additional miles of sweet potatoes, tomatoes and peppers combined; a mile of rows of corn, beans, onions, cucumbers and watermelons combined; 1500 row feet of garlic; an acre of fruit, flowers, herbs, and a kitchen garden. About 5 acres in total. He uses a Farmall 140 tractor for harrowing, cultivating and hilling. And one part-time worker. They grow and preserve most of their own food and animal feed. Neighbors provide companionship, community and practical help with large jobs. Social well-being relies on exchange.
For several years they grew twice as much and ran a 200-member CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), along with some farmers markets, to provide a steady outlet for their produce and a steady stream of income. They had three workers during that time, Jeff learned he loved the farmwork but not the distribution and marketing, which he hired out.
After thirty years, they closed their CSA, and no longer have interns or apprentices. They sell about 60,000lbs of vegetables in bulk, and use most of their income to reinvest in the farm. They keep a few dozen head of cattle, their calves, and some dairy goats, for whom they maintain 100 acres of pastures, and grow 200 bales and 125 rolls of hay. They make lots of compost, spreading it at 30 tons per acre, and use cover crops, They lime as needed and make biodynamic preparations. They don’t use irrigation, plastic mulch or hoophouses, and they minimize inputs from beyond the farm.
Jeff writes about making farming comprehensible and making his farm inviting to people, with camping spaces, trails, swimming holes to encourage lingering in the creek, the forests and fields. From his mentor Hugh Courtney, Jeff seized the idea of gathering as a group to make biodynamic preparations together and giving them away to other farmers. He does love parties, and organizes many farm festivals. Jeff also organizes organic farming conferences (“parties with a purpose”), realizing that sharing knowledge and sharing companionship are both vital to the farming community. These festivals are popular with homesteaders, hippies and rednecks from the area. The importance of mutual aid, tolerance for differences and concern for community wellbeing are part of the essential toolkit for rural dwellers. Steiner spoke about the importance of festivals and religious holidays within the cycle of the year, as well as the inner soul life. Steiner talks about this in the 52 weekly meditations in his Calendar of the Soul.
Another aspect of making farming comprehensible, for Jeff, is to explain Steiner’s words in modern English. He does this with the eight-lecture Agriculture Course, starting with the assertion that the costs of production and the time the farmer works, must be fairly compensated before others concern themselves with the price of farm products. All things in nature are interconnected. Farmers must study the big inter-connected picture. Plant root relationships with microbes, how photosynthesis converts lifeless carbon dioxide from the air into living plants; which are the conditions that agriculture depends on; how we can apply what we have learned. Prior to industrial chemical farming, cows, compost and community were fundamental. A halt to chemical fertilizing and a return to the use of compost instead would turn degeneration to regeneration.
Steiner figured out that using soluble nitrogen chemical fertilizers was destroying the nitrogen-fixing microbes that thrive in soil fed by manure, compost and cover crops. Those soils became dependent on regular inputs of chemical nitrogen, enhancing the profits of the corporations. As well as nitrogen-fixing bacteria, healthy soils have a diversity of bacteria and fungi, ingesting sugary root exudates to fuel their growth and reproduction. Soil protozoa feed on the bacteria and fungi and excrete amino acids containing nitrogen. Plants absorb these amino acids and the nitrogen cycles round again. Amino acids do not need sugars to make them immediately usable by plants, as ammonium nitrogen from chemical fertilizers does. This is why chemically grown produce does not taste as sweet.
Good farming principles have been around for a long time. Steiner reminded us of them when agriculture was turning towards artificial fertilizers and synthetic pesticides. He is one of the founders of the Organic farming movement. Of course, common sense and discernment are needed when reading old books. These days we know that tilling too often destroys the soil structure. We also know that not all farmers are white men, and that women and minority farmers have been not just “underserved” as the euphemism goes, but badly treated and denied their rights.
Jeff writes that in 1983, after ten years making compost and gardening on an acre in Tennessee, he was really smart and loved to talk about all he knew. He formed a local organic gardeners’ group and spoke at conferences. After another ten years, he was growing vegetables on two acres, remineralizing the soil with rock dusts, writing a weekly newspaper column on farming and gardening, and realizing he wasn’t as smart as he had thought.
In another ten years, he was farming eight acres of vegetables, keeping cattle, running tractors, and learning from his neighbors, as well as offering them gardening advice when they asked. In another ten years, with 40 years of farming experience, he began to have confidence in his understanding of agriculture. That was 2013.
He continued, learning how to balance crop production with regeneration via cover crops; learning how many head of cattle the land could support and the relative amounts of forest, crops, pasture and hay that make a thriving ecosystem. Biology, minerals and tillage are the three pillars of agriculture. Decades of growing beets, potatoes and corn gave Jeff the foundation he needed. His farm thrived.
Jeff came to understand Steiner’s insight that nitrogen is the result of good agriculture, not an agricultural input. Steiner saw nitrogen and her “four sisters” (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur) in the air working with the male elements earth elements of silicon, boron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and trace elements. The gender binary division might be fanciful, but the explanation of the dynamics is useful. Building humus is an ongoing task of organic farmers. Rotating crops is one way to build humus in the soil: “Each time we change crops, a whole new set of microbes frees up a whole new set of nutrients.”
A famous but puzzling piece of advice from Steiner was to “go on manuring as before.” In his day, how and when to manure your farm was common accepted knowledge. But this knowledge has been lost. Jeff realized that to understand Steiner’s advice on what changes to make to farming, he needed to better understand what the normal convention of the time was. So he set out to study nineteenth century farming. Jeff started by reading Department of Agriculture Yearbooks. His first realization: how widespread and deep agricultural knowledge was back then. He was reminded of school science experiments depriving growing plants of air, water or light, or drainage. Osmosis, transpiration, fruit tree grafting, plant breeding, were all topics tackled in grade school. Direct observation of nature was expected.
Manuring brings life to the soil in the form of carbon and nitrogen together. Synthetic fertilizers lack carbon, and therefore lack life. When we add calcium and potassium to the soil, they become part of the bodies of microbes. Nitrogen from the air in the soil also becomes part of the microbes. Dead microbes recycle their calcium, potassium and nitrogen through the soil. I wouldn’t call this transmutation, even if Steiner does. I do acknowledge that a big change has taken place.
The biodynamic preparations are well explained in this book. Jeff was skeptical, but he tried the horn manure preparation. He even tried some comparisons like burying manure in a glass jar to compare with the manure-packed cowhorns. The jar manure same out stinking. He saw some improvement to his pastures after sprinkling the preparation. The improvements were much greater when the preparations went along with all the other best farming techniques he knew.
Accepting that a horn manure solution could make a difference is one thing. Accepting that a teaspoon of insoluble powdered quartz, stirred for an hour, can do so, is more of a stretch. But Jeff saw and tasted results. The vegetables tasted great and stored particularly well. Other preparations are made from yarrow flowers stuffed into the bladder removed from a slaughtered stag; German chamomile flowers stuffed into cow intestines; stinging nettle leaves stuffed into clay drain tiles; white oak bark meal in a cow skull, dandelion flowers in a bovine mesentery (a membrane around the cow’s intestines) – all are buried for periods of months to a year or more. Valerian flowers are used to make a fermented juice to dilute and add to the compost pile.
A farming friend who practiced biodynamics said he thought one way the preparations worked was in getting his feet down on the ground and his eyes closer to the crops, compared to being up on his tractor. In some ways, biodynamics reminds me of the idea that hanging crystals above your plants, as a friend of mine did once. It was a bed of fava beans. He didn’t weed them. I just itched to remove the weeds competing for water, nutrients and light! The crystals did not save his beans.
I’m not going to say these things don’t work – I haven’t tried them. But I do think any difference is likely to be less than the differences from getting the basics right or not. And I’m still at the level of getting the basics right. There is a sense that what you believe doesn’t matter. It’s what you observe, and the decisions you make as a result, that help you become a better farmer.
Jeff recommends picking and choosing which ideas to delve into to create our own “guiding lines,” as Steiner named them. Steiner did not leave exact recipes. Jeff says he doubts he has ever met two farmers or gardeners who practice biodynamic farming the same way he does.
Unlike Steiner, I don’t believe in alchemy and the transmutation of elements (except in nuclear physics). Moon forces, I do believe in, at least as far as effects on water. Steiner recommended making horsetail tea (high in silica, a known desiccant), fermenting it for a few weeks, then diluting and adding it to compost piles, to help prevent rot, blight and rust. Is this anti-fungal or pro-beneficial fungi?
Although Steiner favored planting by the moon signs, he maintained that the moon “gets over our human errors.” If we sow seeds at an inauspicious time, they will simply lie in the soil until the moon phase is better.
Steiner named his philosophy and scientific work “anthroposophy.” It encompasses a lot more than the Preparations. The whole farm concept includes the necessity for keeping cows when growing vegetables; growing the feed for those cows on the same farm; relying on biological interactions to supply nitrogen; including social gatherings and humor as well as work sessions; paying attention to instincts as well as theories; combining necessary elements of nutrition (nitrogen and her four sisters, along with silica, lime and other brother elements of the earth, in Steiner’s terminology).
Steiner recommends controlling troublesome weeds by burning their seeds in a wood fire and scattering the ashes thinly over the growing area, for four consecutive years, to bring about less rampant growth. I doubt he meant that all other weed management can be discontinued during those four years!
He also recommends dealing with pest field mouse levels by killing and skinning a young mouse, burning the skin while Venus is in the constellation of Scorpio, and sprinkling the ash over the area. The theory is that the influence of the stars on the burnt mouse skin will inhibit mouse reproduction. Feel free to test out these ideas. I think I’ll stick to using mousetraps, while acknowledging that some people will get satisfaction from these starry methods.
Insect pests are a different matter, and Steiner’s recommendations employ the understanding of leaf/root/flower/fruit days of the biodynamic calendar. Dealing with plant diseases involves counterbalancing the effects of weather on the plants. Horsetail (silica) is used against diseases arising from too much water in the soil.
In his final lecture, Steiner reminds his students to consider his ideas and to learn to act individually, based on their own experience. Steiner wanted to wait to publish his guiding lines until after farmers confirmed them. This is the invitation to test out the theories and publish your results, as some biodynamic farmers have done. Observe whether a certain food or feed supports human or animal wellbeing. Having the farm’s own livestock fertilize the farm creates a perfect, self-contained cycle. Best results come from self-sustaining farms but not fanatical farmers.
Jeff pulled out this quote from Steiner on world conditions, that might be helpful today: “Admittedly, when we consider certain phenomena of our times, we might become a little pessimistic; but in regard to this question of the moral improvement of life we should never tend to a mere contemplation of facts. We should always try to have thoughts that are permeated with impulses of will. We should consider what we can really do for the moral betterment of human life in general
