Growing the Sense-Organ of the Farm

Thoughts from The Philosophy of Freedom

Like a human being, in its childhood, a young farm is almost entirely a sense organ.¹ In its infancy, a farm takes rather more than it gives. A preexisting rhythm becomes enclosed within a skin, and the farm organism develops its own pulse, not unlike the way an embryo develops itself as a sheath of pulsing, growing, expanding information. So the farm begins to distinguish what is internal and what is external.

In its early days, much of the thought conducted on a farm is preoccupied with setting up infrastructure as the farm grows its form. Eventually, this thinking-the-farm-into-being focuses more on the organs within and their development. The farmer learns how to tend the animals, maintain pasture, cultivate garden fertility, and improve it. With practical experience, the farmer grows more wisened and develops a routine that maintains the day-to-day work. As extraordinary grower Alan Chadwick liked to say, “If you obey the technique to perfection, that technique will become invisible.”² An accomplished farmer may no longer think about the technique, having mastered it, but thinking does not cease. In its maturity, the farm’s thought is freed to follow topics beyond maintenance and growth, extending even to efforts that actually nurture the reproduction of other farms by hosting apprentices. If the farmer is like the director of the farm, then apprentices are like embryonic farmers in utero, growing more through each season. In each stage of a farm’s development, thought serves a different role, but its essential character remains the same: thought reconciles what has been separated back into the rest of the world. In this sense, thought is fundamentally ecological.

In The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner posited not final objectivity but rather this form of thinking as an ongoing process that can reconcile the subject alienated from objects by weaving them both back together into a new whole. How a farm relates to its environment changes as the farm matures, and therefore the thoughts involved in reconciling the farm to the evolving environment also change. Because nothing is ever totally separate, thinking on a farm aims at transcending the subject-object division and reintegrating farm and cosmos.

Steiner indicates in the Philosophy of Freedom that “Just as a colorblind person sees only shades of brilliance without hue, so a person without intuition observes only unconnected perceptual fragments.”³ This extends to the individuality of the farm: if the farm lacks certain “organs,” it cannot perceive or engage some things at all.

When a farmer starts a farm, he or she may only have a vague concept of what a farm should be. But the farmer comes to this with his or her own particular, unique feeling life. Ask an artist to paint a picture of a chair. It will look different in each case. But every artist can (usually) agree on what a chair is. The spiritual concept of the farm must pass through the imagination of each individual in order to become a reality. “A mental picture, then is an individualized concept.”⁴ In Rene Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe which says, “This is not a pipe,” he was not kidding: a picture of a pipe isn’t a pipe—you can’t smoke with it! 

The concept of a pipe is an idea that might take any number of unusual, particular forms ranging from the bulbous one Sherlock Holmes used to the thin church-warden one that the wizard, Gandalf, preferred. We may draw any number of three-sided shapes, but no matter who draws it and no matter what differences may arise—assuming the lines are straight—each three-sided shape is nonetheless a triangle. Likewise, the concept of a farm is universal the way that the concept of a triangle is universal, but how “farm” and “triangle” look is individualized when a particular farmer calls on his or her unique imagination.

The concept of “triangle” is interpreted differently by each person. Drawing by Stewart Lundy.

The farm as an organism is a universal idea. The farm as a concrete individuality is what that universal idea looks like when imagined by a particular person. And that is why no cut-and-paste model exists in biodynamics. We cannot lift a model from one place and replicate it identically anywhere. Even if we could, this would be a failure to use our own imaginations and a failure to particularize the universal concept of farm to its specific ecosystem. While the universal principles from another operation may be borrowed, they then must be particularized to work with the farmer’s unique situation. The farmer already engages many of these themes, but making these themes conscious was a significant part of Steiner’s project.

“Thinking is the element through which we participate in the universal process of the cosmos; feeling is the element through which we can withdraw into the confines of our own being.”⁵ In a temperate ecosystem, we can see this wherever the area becomes less differentiated when expressive conditions become subdued. We can recognize the time when an ecosystem or a farm “participate[s] in the universal process of the cosmos” most pronouncedly in winter. Conversely, when each ecosystem or farm is most itself and can “withdraw into the confines of [its] own being” is during summer, when plants are at their fullest differentiation. Spring is less differentiated than summer as many young tender plants are so similar at their earliest stages. In autumn, the summer vitality withdraws, leaving behind the unique signature of the distinct mineral salts in the changing autumn colors.

If the farmer practices seeing winter as the time of thought for the farm and summer as the time of individualized feeling, much can be gained. As Steiner says in the Agriculture Course, there is a great deal of difference between a meditation in winter and a meditation in summer.⁶ Simply asking yourself, “what is a farm?” and then proceeding to try to visualize it—or better, draw it—will help you feel out how the abstract idea can be given life with your own personal mode of feeling.

In Sensitive Chaos, Theodore Schwenk notes the following: “The activity of thinking is essentially an expression of flowing movement. Only when thinking dwells on a particular content, a particular form, does it order itself accordingly and create an idea. Every idea—like every organic form—arises in a process of flow, until the movement congeals into a form. Therefore we speak of a capacity to think fluently when someone is skillfully able to carry out this creation of form in thought, harmoniously coordinating the stream of thoughts and progressing from one idea to another without digression—without creating ‘whirlpools.’ We say of someone who is less successful in this that his thinking is languid and sluggish. An exercise suggested by Rudolf Steiner to help thinking to become fluent and mobile is to recreate and transform in thought, for instance, cloud formations. With this ability to enter thoughtfully into everything and to picture all things into the form of ideas, the process of thinking partakes in the laws of formative processes of the universe. These are the same laws as those at work in the fluid element that renounces a form of its own and is prepared to enter into all things, to unite all things, to absorb all things.”⁷

“We shall call the form in which thought-content first arises intuition.”⁸ This moment of discovery of a concept is that Eureka! moment, which to me, is intuition—the discovery of a new concept that reunifies the broken world—as it is felt. When we think in the essential sense of the word (not parroting popular thoughts or regurgitating things we’ve memorized) we know when we know.

Cognition is like what happens when we look at an optical illusion long enough: initially, we perceive nothing but chaos, and then have that a-ha! moment of recognition. Cognition organizes the chaos of the perceptual world, fitting all that it can into conceptual forms. But if we lack a specific concept (or perhaps lack the intuitive faculty to find new concepts) our cognition will not be able to recognize the thing we’re seeing in much the same way that if we have bad eyes (or no eyes at all) we will not be able to see the same objects clearly.

This is a place of paramount importance. The farmer who lacks specific concepts will be blind to what those concepts could disclose. Even though the task may seem intimidating (because initially, we are all half-blind), it is important to know that we all have intuition or we wouldn’t recognize ice, steam, rain, snow, and fog as all belonging, conceptually, to the same thing—water. You can only develop what you already have, and you are already intuitive. Give your intuition a robust repertoire of dynamic concepts, each of which (even if learned from someone else) must be born in you as a lived experience. This requires effort. Thinking is something that, in fact, only happens with concerted effort. But the thinking farmer will tend to reach greater spiritual heights than any unthinking farmer.

The first thing that we become aware of is our senses. Then what meets us is how those senses make us feel. Only finally does thought arise after the fact. But of these, it is only thought that reunifies us with our environment in a holistic way. Before we’ve discovered certain thoughts, farming may seem strange to us. A new intern may not be able to differentiate weeds from cultivated crops that yield good food. One of our own interns, seeing how we gathered dark compost from a pile and spread it into the soil asked, “Why are you adding dirt to the dirt?” Without the vital concept of compost, a dark earthy pile is just another pile of dirt. Our intern perceived the same outer phenomena we did but did not experience the same thing because certain concepts were lacking.

The same is true when we enter the spiritual world of concepts—someone lacking concepts in that field will be unable to distinguish one thing from another. But colorblindness in no way disproves the existence of color. Fortunately, almost all of us have the capacity to develop the concept of compost and virtually anyone reading this already knows the difference between dirt and compost. Many of our experienced readers will likely want to refer not to dirt but to living soil.

So the idea of a barn—or by extension, a farm individuality—is made real for each person by the interplay of thinking, willing, and feeling forces. Drawing by Stewart Lundy

To engage our intuition on the farm, it is helpful to set aside dedicated time specifically for impartial observation. A clear vision of a plant will evoke a clearer mood within the soul. Likewise, a clear feeling in the soul gives a fuller image of what may then be understood as a concept that bridges the divide between subject and object and thus repairs the world. What happens next? It happens once more. Without ever shedding our individuality, this is an ever-expanding circle or spiral, if you will, of an ever-greater appreciation and participation with the cosmic Whole.

“No other activity of the human soul is as easily misunderstood as thinking. Feeling and willing warm the human soul even when we look back and recollect their original state, while thinking all too easily leaves us cold.”⁹

If we allow ourselves to drift off into icy abstraction, without permeating our thoughts with warm feeling, our thought world becomes desolate and is easily estranged from reality. Our active feeling life anchors universal thoughts to participation in reality. Participation is always particular, never abstract. Steiner reminds us that, “A true individual will be the person who reaches the highest, with his or her feelings, into the world of ideals.”¹⁰ Likewise, a true farm individuality is not just a farm as an abstract concept, nor a native ecosystem but a soulful interplay between those polarities.

The Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics is a 501(c)(3) non-profit

1. “the child is entirely sense-organ (i.e. a child up to the seventh year).”—Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Ground for Education, GA 305 (16 August 1922, Oxford).

2. alan-chadwick.org/html%20pages/quotes.html

3. Rudolf Steiner, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, 89.

4. Rudolf Steiner, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, 100.

5. Rudolf Steiner, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, 101.

6. “One must realise that it makes all the difference whether an exercise of concentration is carried out in mid-winter or in midsummer.” GA327 (12 June 1924, Koberwitz).

7. Theodore Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos, pg. 96.

8. Rudolf Steiner, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, 88.

9. Rudolf Steiner, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, 133.

10. Rudolf Steiner, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, 102.