Biodynamic Pest Management

weed and pest peppers expanded (Part 2 of 2)

Read Part 1 here.

“Consider the infinite, multiple power of the seed how many grasses, fruits, and animals are contained in each kind of seed.” - John Scotus Eriugena¹

Steiner did not exclusively impart biodynamic indications at Koberwitz in 1924. A second and equally significant stream descends from additional indications from Steiner given directly to one of my favorites, Alan Chadwick. Though Chadwick was taciturn when it comes to Steiner, and even deliberately avoided (at least public) use of the biodynamic preparations, there are few people who have turned more people onto Steiner and the greater biodynamic work than Chadwick. Chadwick refraining from the biodynamic preparations was not a criticism of them, but rather that he did not want anyone to imagine that a garden is produced with magic potions. With this, any sensible farmer or gardener can agree: the real work is gardening, and the biodynamic preparations enhance that performance. But without sound farming practices to begin with, the preparations themselves are rendered far less effective. “Once he [Steiner] showed Alan how to increase the amount and spiritual quality of wood ash obtained from a small burn pile. A little tinderbox was placed within the woodpile on what he would call an ‘Ahrimanic day’—damp. cloudy and drizzly. Alan would impatiently ask to set it fully aflame. ‘No!’ Steiner thundered, ‘Can’t you see I'm trying to give you a Key?’”² Chadwick would remark that he was not a student of Steiner but a spiritual “child” of Steiner. Chadwick says, “I’ll be seventy years old. There are seeds still sprouting in me today from things he told me.”³ While some identify with this stream or that stream, there are many tributaries, and others of us identify with their total confluence: the ocean itself.

The simplest way to make a pest pepper is by cracking and spreading the remains, which is perhaps the easiest way to sow “seeds of destruction.” Wherever cracked grain falls, it will rot. Even without roasting them, if cracked, they can only rot and breed pathogenic processes that will inhibit their own species. It will not make the plants sick per se but will reduce their reproduction rate. Much the same reasoning is behind cracking corn when feeding it to hogs — the seed has no defense mechanisms and is directly exposed to the digestive warmth of the animal.

Steiner suggests that the fire of decomposition need not be literal fire, but may be the metabolic fires of putrefaction. “You might also let it decay; possibly this would be even more thorough, only it is difficult to collect the products of decay.”⁴ In such a case, one might collect seeds and crack them in a blender or mortar. Submerge them in water and let them ferment anaerobically without any added cultures. This usually smells offensive and may be just as effective — if not more so — as burning the seeds. Something similar can be done with pests. Maria Thun reports collecting slugs, dropping them in water, and using the fermented juice to water around her plants to deter more slugs with good results.

Suppose you take fermented weed seed juice and spray it on open flowers of your target plant. In that case, you can “infect” the plant at the ovary itself and render that next round of seeds significantly less viable. Some of them may even rot on the plant instead of curing properly. To test this, spray out the juice on half the open flowers of an area and see how the two sections behave. The fermented weed seed juice must be sprayed while the weed flowers are open and are still being visited by pollinators. If bees are visiting, the plant is still open to the world and offering up nectar. It is through this openness that the plant can be infected.

On this note of rotted seeds, horn manure should be made with grass-fed cow manure that is entirely grain-free. If grain-fed horn manure is used in grain crops, you are effectively spraying out a pepper within the horn manure aimed at those grain crops. This will cause no harm to most plants at all — in fact, other species than the grain would benefit — but if cows are fed any corn, that manure should never be used to fertilize corn unless you specifically want to corrupt the seed-forming process as in huitlacoche.

Using too much chicken manure on grain crops is also dangerous. Like rodents, chickens have a very short digestive tract and leave behind an enormous amount of the vital power of the seed in their manure, but in a destructive form — enormously potent for other crops, but not one that should be fed back to the same crop. Chicken manure should be thoroughly composted (ideally for years) before returning to nourish the same species it fed on to avoid deleterious effects.

Steiner did not go unchallenged when he proposed pest peppers. One person kept insinuating that burning weed seeds was a kind of “black magic.” While we can understand misgivings, the pest peppers harbor no malevolence. I often have to weed around my tomatoes or thin carrots, wishing no ill to grass or to the carrots I remove. We wish to grow better for food people and a healthier world, and sometimes we have to encourage specific plants or animals to give us the space to do so. Fire has long been a great friend to humanity and, in many ways, is life itself.

“In the Agricultural Course at Koberwitz, at which one or two of those here were also present, I indicated guiding lines for agriculture. An elderly farmer attended the course, who is also an old member of the Society. Throughout the whole of the course he could not rid himself of a feeling of misgiving; it kept coming out in the discussions. Again and again he would say: ‘But if we do that, we shall be using occult means for practical ends; won't that be steering too close to the sphere of ethics? Could not these truths be applied also in a wrong way?’ He was never able to get rid of this scruple; he was always suspicious of black magic in the application. Needless to say, these things do become black magic when they are not handled as they ought to be handled. And it was for this reason that I said once on that occasion quite explicitly: ‘A high standard of morality is absolutely essential in dealing with these matters; therefore I assume at the outset that those who attend this course attend it on purely ethical grounds, desirous only to serve humanity and help agriculture. The Agricultural Experimental Circle has accordingly to be regarded also as an ethical circle, which definitely sets itself the task of seeing that the truths are applied in the right and proper way.’ The Gods use magic, and the difference between white and black magic consists only in this: in white magic one intervenes in a moral, selfless way, and in black magic in an immoral, selfish way. There is no other difference.”⁵

To summarize, Steiner suggests that anything that can be used can be misused, plain and simple. The moral question is always with us: why are we doing this? If we only have a negative reason, that is not enough. But it is right to protect the weak, and good to protect the environment for human foods.

As spiders catch most of what is prevalent around them in their webs, mice eat seeds of whatever plants are most present. As a result, their manure constantly shifts ecosystems towards polyculture. If one species predominates, mice make more manure out of that seed, which serves as a “pepper.” If you were to feed weed seeds to rodents and collect the manure, you would have a very effective weed pepper that was only submitted to metabolic fires and never left the living realm.

Why rodents in particular? Their digestive tract is so inefficient that they must consume their own feces to extract enough to live, even when eating high-energy foods like grains. They leave behind much of the vital value of grains in their manure, which can only proliferate harmful effects towards each given species.

For Goethe (and Steiner after him), the entire process on the way to forming a seed in the plant is “male,” whereas the womb of the earth is “female.” The aim in “peppers” is to collect this so-called male impulse, corrupt it, and turn it into its opposite.

If we accept provisionally the image of seeds in plants as male, the other peppers speak more clearly. Insects and other organisms with a “ventral nerve cord”⁶ (Bauchmark is not usually translated this way in English) should be burned in their entirety. This is because the male reproductive process is entirely within simpler organisms and there is no practical way (or need) of separating the interior testes for burning.

Similarly, for mammals, we are really after not just the hide but the outer skin and all it contains. Specifically, the scrotum and testes is all that is needed to make a mammalian pest pepper.

What is most interesting here is the specificity in The Spear of Destiny above which elements were to be burned, namely elements from a “male rabbit” and specifically the “testes and a portion of the rabbit skin” which I take to mean the scrotum and its contents. Even fictions contain facts.

An even stronger pepper might be made by considering Steiner’s view of the generation of male reproductive power. “After having been produced in the bone marrow, the red and white corpuscles naturally enter the blood stream.”⁷ What culminates in the seed in men begins in marrow, migrates as white corpuscles. As such, bones and blood burned as well would undermine the origin point and intermediary life of what becomes the male reproductive power. If we step outside biodynamics for a moment and consider permaculturist Sepp Holzer’s approach to keeping deer away from fruit trees, he makes a “bone sauce” which is from the burnt drippings of bones and then painted onto trees. Holzer claims that this “bone sauce” keeps deer away for years. Something similar could be devised for especially noxious weeds which would involve charring not only its seeds but also its leaves and roots. This is extra work, and not strictly necessary, though it would have a more dramatic enervating effect on the target species than just the seed pepper by itself. Lest this be considered too far afield, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer reports from Steiner, “One can make the weed-destroyer (pepper) more effective by burning the root-stock together with the seeds of the weed in question.”⁸ Similarly, if a plant reproduces primarily not by seeds but rhizomes (e.g., bamboo), the roots should be used to make a pepper. Wherever the germinal power of proliferation lies, that is the basis of the pepper — whether plant or animal.

“Every plant and being carries within itself the germ of its own annihilation. Just as water is a requirement for fertility, on the one hand, so fire is the destroyer of fertility. Fire consumes fertility... Because seed power obviously continues to work after it is sown, so too the seed ash has a similarly far-reaching effect of annihilation.”⁹

In Alan Chadwick’s terms, the “great secret of seeds as a great secret compost, a fortune chest. It is completely unrealized.”¹⁰ The incredible potency of seeds for improving compost is missing because each well-formed seed is seed chaos: the primordial undifferentiated potential of the cosmos, of all planetary powers, waiting to be released. “In a certain sense we find compressed in the seed, as in a point, the forces which are divided later over the entire plant.”¹¹ To quote another modern author, the esoteric path “recognizes in the sperm the CHAOS from which life arises vehemently.”¹² In Paracelsus’ terms, in the seed, the “light of nature exists not, but is dead.”¹³ This is to say, according to Alan Chadwick, “the seed is utmost idée and least metamorphosis.”¹⁴ The seed is a static storehouse of pure potentiality — “chaos” or idée — while the plant’s growth is unfolding into order — “cosmos” or metamorphosis. As the potential energy of the seed is consumed by life, the plant using this kinetic energy grows.

In external terms, “seed chaos” might be thought of as having many of the qualities people associate with stem cells, which is not to claim it is literally stem cells — merely that people attribute to stem cells what in previous times was attributed to a kind of divine formless potentiality.

Chadwick goes further to describe a process of making what he calls “seed compost” in a metal container, without producing flames or smoke from the seeds and over a cold fire for a long time. “If you had manipulated, as Steiner taught me—and we will do the burning of all that rubbish, so that none of it flamed, and no smoke came out, but smoldered for a very long time, you would end with all those gases in the heap, in the ash. And so vital and virile is that, the moment that you put it on the soil and put water on it, it goes pussst just like lime does. It will explode!”¹⁵ The result, at least the version Steiner taught Chadwick is closer to quicklime by the end and Chadwick even warns it is unsafe to touch. In alchemical terms, a low heat retains the qualities that would otherwise burn off. Paracelsus writes, “That which burns is sulphur, that which evaporates is mercurius, and that which remains in the ash is salt.”21 As such, the fire that makes peppers should be controlled. We do not want flames to erupt from what we are submitting to fire nor do we want it to create smoke. This is a delicate kind of fire, which must neither be too hot nor too cold. “The fire must not be too hot, for the heavens and earth of man could not bear it. Nor should it be so gentle as to be incapable of destroying and consuming astrayness and selfness.”¹⁶

By retaining the germ oil in the gently toasted seeds, we do not leave the realm of the living. Instead, what is left retains the vitality and soul of the original organism but without its organizing principle. In simpler terms, we want to retain the resources in the seed that would have nourished the young plant but also render the seeds non-viable. As a result, they can only rot, spreading disease for that specific species.

Weed seeds so burned and introduced to the soil do no good to the weed in question, but hand over all its power to the soil and other plants. What is experienced as a power of destruction for one species is experienced as a fertilizer for other plants.

In pest peppers we invert the seed-force. As matter has antimatter as a counterpart, in peppers we create anti-germination force, a proliferating power of inhibited reproductive power. Nothing is truly destroyed, it is only rearranged in a way that our chosen plot of land is protected.

1. John Scotus Eriugena, The Voice of the Eagle: The Heart of Celtic Christianity

2. Stephen J Crimi, Entreé into Alan Chadwick’s Garden in Performance in the Garden by Alan Chadwick.

3. As quoted by Stephen J Crimi, Entreé into Alan Chadwick’s Garden in Performance in the Garden by Alan Chadwick.

4. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture VI, (GA327, 14 June, 1924 Koberwitz)

5. R. Steiner (GA317)

6. R. Steiner, Health and Illness II, (GA348, 8 January 1922, Dornach)

7. Report by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer Appendix to Agriculture Course, from the 2nd German Edition, abridged.

8. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course

9. Alan Chadwick, Performance in the Garden, pg. 109.

10. Alan Chadwick, Reverence, Obedience and the Invisible in the Garden, pg. 93(

11. R. Steiner, Macrocosm and Microcosm, (GA150, 5 May 1913, Paris)

12. Samael Aun Woer, “Adolescence” in Fundamentals of Gnostic Education

13. Paracelsus, Buch von der geberung, 1:253: “wo aber der sameinder naturligt, da ist das liecht natur nit, sonder es ist tot.”

14. Alan Chadwick, “Seed: Utmost Idee and Least Metamorphosis,” Green Gulch Farm, CA 11 Feb 1980, https://chadwickarchive.org/ca-0302/

15. Wo man Bauchmark hat, muss man das ganze Tier verbrennen

16. John Pordage, Sophia