Hugh Courtney & DIY Quality Testing Biodynamic Preparations
a simple water test
The aim with biodynamic preparations is humus that has become so uniform that the original parent material is almost entirely invisible. When humus is well formed, it develops a claylike (“colloidal”) quality. You can take such humus, mold it into shapes, and reform it back into a ball. It has a liveliness to it that isn’t like dusty organic matter or wood chips — it is more attracted to itself than to the surrounding world. You’ll see such beautiful humus fill your fingerprints. This is what we aim for with biodynamic preparations.
Humus is always on the way to complete disintegration, but we arrest it just before it can turn to dust. When humus leaves its moist claylike stage and turns to dust, it releases the etheric formative forces that had gone into its original composition. It is the liberated vital forces in humus that we want to bring to the soil and plants. Alex Podolinsky says, “There is no ‘permanent’ humus. Humus only exists at the height of a PROCESS of continuous becoming. That is, in statu nascendi. ‘Permanent’ humus would be dead material.”1 Humus, as such, is a living process, not a static thing. But it is so alive, that it is more attracted to itself than it is to water, the universal solvent.
Hugh Courtney showed me a simple way to check quality. You take some of your preparation, roll it into a tight ball as if you were making a cookie and drop it into a mason jar full of water. In the photo above, you can see some discoloration. This is natural after two years. Because good humus is not water soluble, it shouldn’t dissolve when you put it into a jar of water. But for any fresh biodynamic preparation dropped into water, you want to see clear water, minimal sedimentation, minimal milkiness to the water, minimal discoloration to the water, few floating particles on the surface of the water (not counting seeds as a negative sign), a ball that maintains its shape, and, ideally, no offensive odor. While this is not a conclusive experiment — preparations transform differently in different locations — it does give you a clear image of how a specific preparation interacts with water.
This is not dissimilar to various erosion experiments. The water should not be taking the soil away with it — and, similarly, water should not be taking organic matter away with it.
When I visited Hugh Courtney in 2015, I brought my first attempt at making horn manure. It immediately disintegrated. I looked at it with chagrin, but Hugh Courtney was kind enough to tell me that it was “not without value.” Only almost a decade later do I see why he could say this. What I had brought turned into a cloudy soup, but it didn’t immediately discolor the water. It wasn’t lovely or coherent humus — it didn’t maintain its shape — but it didn’t smell bad either. You can see in the picture below a lot of the original parent material had not decomposed. Because of this, it’s clear it had not undergone a complete transformation.
If my preparation had not transformed at all, the water would have turned dark and green and it would have smelled bad. As it was, I had partly transformed horn manure, but it was not to my standards. This event motivated me to take a headlong dive into biodynamics. Why? Because if you can do it wrong, it also means there’s a way to do it right — and I wanted to do it right.
With Ben Nommay at JPI in September 2024, he and I tested some of JPI’s current preparations. These were moldable and mostly colloidal humus. Placed in water, they did not stink. They each held form for different amounts of time.
Over time, most samples I’ve tested made from horn manure disintegrate and settle out on the bottom, but Hugh Courtney’s sample of 500P (horn manure plus all the compost preparations) remained stable in the water for 2+ years. I asked Hugh: “Why isn’t everyone using this version of horn manure?” to which he replied, “Because they don’t know about it!” To me, this is in the kind of humus we want — something so energetic that it holds its “charge” submerged in water and refuses to dissolve away.
Testing compost or biodynamic preparations in water is the rough-and-ready DIY version of something like chromatography, which allows you to see a more articulate “picture” of capillary dynamics on paper. The layers of cloudiness, debris, and non-soluble humus give an easy image of the dynamics at work in each sample if it were to be used in soil. How does it hold together? What color is the water? How much, if anything, floats on the surface? How long does it hold its shape as a ball? Does it smell bad? These are all things each of us can assess within nothing more than a sample and water. Knowing the qualities of a given preparation helps speak to what its particular uses might be — no particular answer necessarily disqualifies a particular sample, but recognizing their inner qualities is a step towards putting them to use correctly.
Introductory Chromatography
In biodynamics, we strive to remain “within the realm of the living” as Rudolf Steiner puts it. This means that for the creation of fertilizers, we focus on things that were quite recently participating in a living organism and try to retain that liveliness so we can impart it into the soil.
Unfortunately, “life” as a quality is invisible: you know it when you see it, but it can’t be quantified. How do we make the subtle qualities of life something we can see with our own eyes?
Have you tested your preparations or compost this way? If so, what results have you found?
Alex Podolinsky, Living Agriculture, pg. 8.
Thank you Stewart for sharing these words of wisdom from Hugh. May we all continue to learn & evolve in alignment with healing the Earth ❤️❤️
I knew i was finally doing it right when I was able to form those clay like balls with no turning ever in making the compost . It took a long time to get there .