Old King Farm

Exploring the Magic with Dr. Orest Pelechaty

Dr. Orest Pelechaty describes himself as neither a Steinarian, nor an anthroposophist, but rather as one who follows a parallel track that uses the best of a number of agricultural principles. He explains also that he is a doctor of Eastern medicine, a practitioner of western herbalism and aromatic medicine, and the proud custodian of a twenty thousand book library pertaining to mystical and occult topics. As a lover of ancient knowledge, he jokingly acknowledges that he still grieves the destruction of the library at Alexandria in Egypt eons ago. Most of the library he now stewards was endowed by Robert Lacy, a scholar who spent 40 years collecting the books. As a hermit for the last 20 years of his life, Lacy focused on alchemical studies, among other topics. Dr. O, as he is fondly called by those who know him, explains that for most of his life he has had premonitions of apocalypse. So finding an agrarian area to develop self sufficiency was a long time goal, one that he and his wife have manifested at Old King Farm in Vermont.

Old King Farm, established in 2009, consists of 102 acres. Like most land along the east coast of the United States, it has a rich hunting, foraging, and agricultural history dating back to native American use. Dr. O and his wife, Susan, caretake these acres now, after closing their New Jersey clinic where they integrated acupuncture, homeopathy, and other healing modalities. At Old King Farm, their dedication to healing has been extended to the land, where biodynamic agriculture and other practices enliven the soil.

Mary Maruca, JPI: What was the condition of your 102 acres when you bought it? Say a little about the history of the land, as well as the meaning of its name and the vision you continue to hold for it.

Dr. O: During the first decade of the twenty-first century, my wife, Susan, and I felt that cataclysmic changes might soon be impacting life on the East Coast. So we started seeking a refuge where we could ride out the storm. Initially, we considered Hawaii but destiny had other places in store for us. Events brought us to the lower Champlain Valley, to a bucolic landscape steeped in history. The land we now steward was owned for generations by the King family. The wet clay on the farm produces prodigious grasses, as well as various medicinal plants. In the 1800s, our acreage was used for a Merino sheep farm. In the 1900s, the farm transitioned to dairy, and eventually, it became a haven for artists.

So we named it Old King Farm to honor those who came before us. In the vessel of these 102 acres, we placed our healing ministry called Odhyana Kandro Ling, Tibetan for Holy Garden of Angels. We also hold space for Blessed Land, the home and gardens of our partners, Rick Richmond and Donna Visco, teachers of Pranic Healing. Over the years that we have stewarded this space, many souls have come as helpers, co-creators, and celebrants on retreat here on the land. Also, quite a few short and long-term seekers have been drawn to the geomantic uniqueness that is a palpable part of this landscape.

Q: What were some of the first things you did to transform the farm into what it is today? Was the transformation of the land part of a long-term plan? If so what were its components?

A: Besides housing a Buddhist nun and then inviting a series of high lamas to offer blessings, I began conducting fire pujas according to the appropriate times on the celestial calendar.¹ We also engaged with others to help determine how to manifest a healing and retreat center here, whose mission to be of service to others for the next seven generations. So we have had visionaries, clairvoyants, engineers, farmers, permaculturists, shamans, lamas, yogis, agronomists, and leaders in biodynamic agriculture all contributing their ideas, insights, critiques, and guidance. Most importantly, we learned to listen as the land manifested its extraordinary energy. From the high oracle of the Kingdom of Bhutan to the United States Department of Agriculture, to local folks, we have happily welcomed all who have come our way with good thoughts and advice.

Q: It strikes me that you are doing something really different at Old King Farm since you incorporate Buddhist beliefs, biodynamic agriculture, other forms of agriculture, and medicinal practices not just for the land but also for the people. How did you bring all these together and why do you consider them all important?

A: My entire life I have been passionate about collecting knowledge, especially of a higher caliber such as that of the Wisdom traditions. I have spent my professional life as a holistic physician rooted in Oriental medicine even while studying a range of other healing systems. I have long realized that the health of people is inseparable from the health of the food they consume, which means, of course, that the soil needs to be robust and the environment healthy.

Logically, it seems to me, as we pursue healthy lives, this effort can only lead us to develop wider and deeper understandings of our interrelationships with all of Life. This awareness is only just beginning to dawn in a bigger way in the West, but has been known and taught by luminaries in most of human cultures since the beginning of written history. At Old King Farm, we are only sharing the healthy protocols that the wise ones before us laid down for all of us to follow—not just to benefit ourselves and our families but for all parts of this web of Life.

Q: How did you become aware of biodynamic agriculture, and did you work with Steiner’s principles on your land from the beginning? What are some of the first steps you took to create a biodynamic environment? How do you continue to grow this aspect of the farm? Are all 102 acres under biodynamic agriculture status?

A: I suppose that nature and nurture both brought me to biodynamics. I was conceived on a farm not far from Ghent, New York, an area that at the time was a hot bed of biodynamic awareness and experimentation.² Yet my parents moved to New Jersey, and it was decades before I discovered theosophy and ultimately Rudolf Steiner. Being a student of history, religion, and philosophy, as well as the child of Ukrainian refugees who had escaped from Stalin’s reign of terror, it was in my genes to love the soil and seek only natural and real foods. My study of the work of Weston Price was not so much a revelation as a confirmation of what I already believed. Stories of chornozem, the Russian term for the black earth of Europe’s bread basket, and my own experiences helping my grandparents maintain their garden and orchard using natural practices in the 1960s demonstrated the basic organic principles I later became exposed to in Steiner’s work. I also spent time attending sweat lodges at Chestnut Ridge, encountering Eurythmy in Princeton, and becoming aware of Waldorf schools as introduced to me by my staff when I led our New Jersey clinic. So when I became a gentleman farmer here in Vermont, the first thing I was inspired to do was to seek out biodynamic support!

Somehow I was guided to Ron Krupp, aka “The Woodchuck,” who conducted two rounds of soil testing (he could not believe the mineral richness of our soils). He introduced us to Peter and Krystyna Jensen who had a twenty-acre farm 3 miles away, and, as anthroposophists, were practicing biodynamic methods on their land. Under Peter’s mentorship, I met my teachers, Dr. Basil Williams and Hugh Courtney. As their knowledge and wisdom seemed priceless, we provided a platform for them to teach at our annual BioDynamic Spring Fling intensives. Indeed, to stir and spray preps onto a hundred acres required apprentices, even if only for Memorial Day weekends, and thus our Spring Fling brought out students for these wise teachers, as well as willing hands to spray the biodynamic preparations across the land.

Image: Hugh Courtney

As Peter would say quoting Steiner, ‘Farming is a practical matter.” The gourmet feasting, meditations, hands-on-training by healers all raised the vibration here, while the live music concerts, especially with The Dharma Bums playing jazz ragas while the kids roamed the spring time meadows “painting the landscapes with Light.” All of it made the elementals and devas rather overjoyed.

Image: Dr. Orest Pelechaty, Dr. Basil Williams, and Susan Pelechaty

Q: What is pranic agriculture? How does it differ from biodynamics? Do you blend them with other practices such as alchemy? Also, how do you feel these philosophical strands interweave in a practical way across the landscape?

A: Because we live in extraordinary times, we have found it necessary to use innovative methods and strategies. As our world shrinks, it seems that our culture has unprecedented access to the entire spectrum of human knowledge in the palm of our hands. So it should be no surprise that at Old King Farm we approach the challenges of our current and potentially future environmental calamities by drawing on various systems of regenerative agriculture and ecological healing. As a repository of useful applied knowledge and a seed bank of the highest spiritual traditions, we consistently aspire to understand, put into practice, and pass onto future generations the best practical techniques in a condensed, essential form. For me personally, having been blessed with remarkable good fortune to meet with, study, and be guided by some of the best teachers and masters of my time, I cannot do anything less than try to share what I can with others.

Professionally my training, studies, and practice are best described as blended medicine—pragmatically I use tools and techniques from multiple systems. Spiritually, my life’s long, relentless quest for higher truth has led to my ordination as an interfaith minister, ecumenically serving others through the language and symbols they feel most comfortable with. Thus, when faced with the question of how to heal Earth’s ecological crisis as it is being expressed here where we live, and how to do so with minimal expense of money and resources, while achieving practical results quickly, I, of course, sought out whatever approaches I could find that focused on natural agricultural practices. Over the years, we have incorporated biodynamics, permaculture, pranic agriculture, Jadam, indigenous processes, and more. As the primary steward of this land, and the chief architect of this hugely ambitious endeavor I see my role as making sense of these things and avoiding a mixed up tukpa, a Tibetan culinary word for a random stew, a kind of failed goulash.

This was used by some of my gurus to describe the chaotic medley that can result when there is a lack of intellectual rigor and an over-enthusiastic mash up of things. Let me give an analogy. When approaching the health of a human being holistically, we can design a program that includes: dynamic exercise (yang), yoga stretching (yin), wiser food choices that promote elimination and specific supplements that add minerals and other necessary elements to the body, as well as gentle herbal teas.

We might suggest a homeopathic remedy or prescribe a traditional Chinese medicine formula. We do this while the person continues their chiropractic, massage, and psychotherapy. Using such an approach, the potential for “miraculous” results is high. Thousands of my patients have benefitted profoundly from such an approach. This does not fit the dominant materialist medical perspective, however, and surely does not allow for research studies that differ from the scientific model of trying to isolate a single variable and determine if that is the “magic bullet.” Neither human beings in the real world nor living ecological systems work that way! As William Blake said in the early 1800s, “Now I lay me down and pray to God for me to keep—from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” We cannot expect to do well into the future shackled by dogmatic scientism when practical answers lay in closely observing Nature and humbly working with a spiritual science, as Steiner offered.

Image: Dr. Basil Williams with Spring Fling participants

In the same way, we use different approaches on the land, based on the need. Thus, pranic healing—a modern training in a timeless system of energy healing—assesses and adjusts the prana or life force in an organism to strengthen and harmonize it. When applied to plants, it offers wide possibilities. Since Steiner said to treat the farm as a single organism, a unity, the integration of this sacred science to our land is obvious.

Q: What were some of the major principles that you’ve learned through the years, for example from Hugh Courtney and others? What topics did Hugh cover when he spoke at the farm? Also, what did Dr. Williams share?

A: This exploration into biodynamic agriculture has been quite the adventure. Much of our work has been serendipitous, bringing us unexpected miracles, coincidences, and tremendous blessings. This is not surprising as the dynamics of spiritual work, especially in trying times, elicits a supportive impulse from the invisible world in unexpected ways. Also, the importance of community cannot be overemphasized. I owe a debt of gratitude to those in the biodynamic community who publish our annual almanacs, who make and purvey the preps, and who have come to study and assist through the years. I have learned from many mentors, among them Dick Brigham, a native Vermonter and long-time anthroposophist, who emphasized that working with the biodynamic preparations is building a relationship from the human realm to the elementals.

So we strive whenever possible to engage folks, even unexpecting newbies, to participate in the stirring and applications on the farm. This is one way I try to honor the lineage from my biodynamic teachers. The last time I sat in person with Hugh Courtney was at our consecrated fire hearth where I shared our regular adaptation of a Sang Cho, a traditional Tibetan sacred smoke offering. It’s much like a huge smudging, used to purify a large area. It offers a Hermetic fumigation via incense.

Now Hugh was notorious for his very strict adherence to the precise canon of Rudolf Steiner, unlike Dr. Basil Williams who was a bit of a maverick the way he combined other healing materials into the preps when they were being stirred, often as a result of his direct spiritual communication with the elementals. Since Hugh was very protective of the original system, I only had the audacity to invite Hugh to our New Age Buddhist indigenous adaptation of an ancient pre-Vedic fire ceremony after I heard that he had done some agnihotra fire pujas at this farm in Virginia. So, at the conclusion of Hugh’s third annual teaching mission to our place in Vermont—he was well into his 80s at that time—we were sitting by the sacred fire at dawn. Both of us noticed chemtrails coming across the sky from the West. Hugh’s unsolicited words to me then were: “Yes, Orest, there is a spiritual war.” Those words were the last teaching he gave at Old King Farm.

How can I ever repay his kindness in sharing his lifetime of passionate work in biodynamics with us? So I pass on that kindness by trying actively to share the message of biodynamic agriculture as one of hope and a radical act of resistance against the forces of benighted materiality. Hugh was likely the world authority on biodynamic pest control, aka peppering. Last year I led a small group in suburban New Jersey where we made an ashing of lantern flies. We also have had tremendous success reducing ticks and poison parsnip from dozens of acres of prime habitat on Old King Farm, so I am trying to share the knowledge.

The last several years I have been honored to be invited to the Elders Gathering at the Sunray Peace Village in the Green Mountains where I have passed on what I can to an amazing community of spiritual warriors whose peace keeping mission includes deep ecological stewardship. As Hugh’s son-in-law, “Tuscarora” Mike, taught me, these seemingly simple preparations are spiritual medicine. I hope to be worthy of reaching his level of humility and reverence for this work.

As for Dr. Basil, he walked the talk of Steiner’s legacy. A respected physician, he practiced anthroposophical medicine and travelled the world on spiritual pilgrimages. His was a more openly eclectic perspective than Hugh’s perspective. On his first visit to our land, he wanted to “get input directly from the invisible beings as to how we should best proceed” for the three scheduled days of our second Spring Fling.

So, I took him and a dozen others on an afternoon hike to what I knew was the most “special” part of this land. Little did I know how just how special it is! Dr. Basil had a strong interest in deep archeology, specifically the Ibero Celtic legacy in stone found all over New England.

This is still heretical to mainstream academics. Suffice it to say that his trained eye (and I suspect his developed spiritual sight) allowed him to pick out features on our land and the adjacent property that still amazes me when I think about his words. My wife Susan, a healer who is not overtly clairvoyant, saw many “little people” dancing on one of our hillside meadows. They were overjoyed at our presence, a group of human beings who were open and respectful of the depths of Nature’s wisdom.

While traveling along a significant ley line that Dr Basil easily identified, my herbalist friend, Judi Millar, saw and explained the features of a vortex, an inter-dimensional door way clearly guarded by specific plants. I knew enough about such things from my studies with David Winston, a remarkable teacher of medical herbalism and a bona fide medicine man, to take such things very seriously. Let me just say that this topic has grown in scope over the years to the point that I am recording our paranormal anomalies as a book.

Just to bring this full circle let me say that between our ongoing Buddhist eco-shamanic work and our commitment to regular biodynamic practices, we have become Grand Central Station for multidimensional anomalies!

The frequency and sheer wonderment of such events took a quantum leap after Hugh lead us in installing and empowering a biodynamic field generator at the heart of thislandscape. This resulted in a long list of examples showing demonstrated improvement in our agricultural efforts as well as an uptick in elemental occurrences.

Q: You mentioned that your farm bridges practicality and spirituality.

A: It’s incredibly important to me to apply Steiner’s directive to be sure that both material and spiritual process are equally given attention. From the very early days here we sought to preserve the incredible gifts that Nature presented to us. The diverse communities of healing plants are preserved under United Plant Savers guidelines for the creation of a botanical sanctuary. With federal aid, we established a riparian corridor with over 1,000 plantings of native, early pollen source trees and shrubs for the bees, as well as shelter and food for the wildlife that crosses our land. We help protect a part of the major genetic exchange route between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks. When we explored our 102 acres, we found thousands of Monarch butterflies each year on over 40 acres of milk weed, so we registered this area as an official Monarch Way Station. Since then, however, their numbers have dwindled. A few years ago, I found only one cocoon, nestled on the Stupa. Just one, as if they were saying good bye. So sad...

We also registered the farm as a wildlife sanctuary, since we prohibit hunting. Thus we strive to “get on the radar” within the dominant culture, to communicate our vision and, we hope, inspire others. Although our commercial hemp crop is nationally certified both biodynamic and organic, we also grow some food crops in small amounts as experiments. Our bigger effort has been permaculture perennials, such as fruit trees and berry shrubs. We do keep some cows, purely for their energetic influence and for lovely manure to build up our soils and make biodynamic compost. We brought these in, based on the advice of our Vedic Agriculture consultant, who told us that keeping the ancient Indic breed of cows would encourage Lakshmi Devi, the goddess of fortune and so much more, to smile upon us. Although compact and thus easier to handle, they are best adapted to semi-tropical climates. Here, they would require heated stalls and full spectrum lights to survive the severity of a Vermont winter! So, our girls are Lucy and Sky.

They are a Dexter breed of cows, a smaller, super hardy cow from Ireland. The psychic barometer of the farm changed palpably once they arrived onto the landscape.

Q: How have you included the community impulse on the farm? Would you say a bit more about your community workshops and other teaching events?

A: Our goal has been to preserve and enhance the Land and cultivate the People simultaneously. We have offered both short and long retreats, hosted workshops and special events, provided work study and residential opportunities, and crowned these efforts with our annual Spring Fling Earth Healing Intensives. These ran for 10 years, until the Covid shutdowns and the passing away of our master teachers of biodynamic agriculture. So, as we are not a regular truck farm and never hired “Woofers,”³ we have spent the past several years in intensive medicinal hemp production, where teams of part time workers have had some exposure to the ethos and techniques of biodynamics in action.

Q: You mentioned that the stupa is the energetic/organizational pattern around which the farm has developed. How do you feel/see the impact of this on the farm?

A: The construction, consecration, and active engagement with a precisely built stupa have been some of the most important accomplishments of our work to date.

The stupa has certainly been part of our connection to this region. For its construction, we drew helpers from as far as Montreal, multiple states here in the North East, and also Nepal and Bhutan. The stupa functions on multiple dimensions and embodies the mandala principle, a concept central to esoteric Buddhism. It serves as a tangible material monument to full enlightenment, a crystallizing capacitor for positive karma. It works like a transceiver for spiritual power and pulls blessings into the area, even as it helps to raise the vibrations of anyone near it, even animals and bugs. I suspect that the invisible beings are quite sensitive to it.

Many years ago, Enid Martinez, a very clear psychic, received a strong clairvoyant message from Gaia herself who apparently was pleased with the work being done at Old King Farm. There are many events like this that validate the amazing feedback from the spiritual world that efforts we humans are undertaking are appreciated. This is why I always encourage people to do even the simplest applications of basic biodynamics wherever they are, even in cities, even with penthouse gardens.

Now before someone raises an eyebrow, let me share a quote from Rudolf Steiner:

“May wisdom shine through me
May love glow within me
May strength penetrate me
So that in me may arise
A helper of humanity
A servant of sacred things”

If we briefly study this prayer, we find parallels to the Mahayana Buddhist vow of the bodhisattva, the aspiration to serve as an instrument for universal salvation. Also we see key elements of Vajrayana, esoteric Buddhism, whereby one relies on special skillful means to facilitate a swifter, more efficient evolution of oneself as a hero of enlightenment, working for the benefit of everyone and everything everywhere. Here in the first three lines, Steiner references the virtues of wisdom, love, and strength. In the tantric Buddhist yogas these qualities are understood as being dormant in every sentient being. To help these spiritual seeds to flourish, one can use anthropomorphic archetypes, specifically Manjugosha, the personification of Transcendental Wisdom, Avalokita of Universal Compassion, and Vajrapani of Spiritual Power. I was amazed when I first encountered this obvious connection.

Upon further contemplation, one should not be so surprised as Steiner matured within Theosophy, the life’s work of Madame Blavatsky, the Ukrainian born psychic visionary whose claimed connections with Tibetan masters led both to the serious study of comparative religions in various universities and to what is referred to as the New Age movement pretty much everywhere else. Her work passed through the more “hinduized” Anne Besant to help Master ChoaKuk Sui formulate his system of Pranic Healing.

I indeed find it fascinating to step back and contemplate the tides and cycles of karmic currents. What was happening at the turn of the nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries? Dr. Carl Jung’s Big Red Book was being downloaded in visions at this key phase in world history. Also, the Armenian seeker, George Gurdjieff, left Czarist Russia on his journey to the East, and brought deep knowledge to the West that he called The Fourth Way. His applied Stoic philosophy was supported by methods clearly drawn from the Sufi and Tibetan traditions. I really like this quote of his: “Real love is a cosmic force which goes through us. If we crystallize it, it becomes the greatest power in the world.”

The stupa contains an array of crystals, yet is itself a kind of crystallization in stone of spiritual principles, one of which is identical to the gnostic wisdom of Egypt: “As above, so below.” This is why astrology is indispensable for effective biodynamic practice. Indeed, Hugh Courtney spent the first half of his life as an astrologer and, since my knowledge of the art is limited, I miss his insights and guidance through these troubled times.

Truly, when you think about it, biodynamics as a regenerative force for reenergizing soil, plant, and animal life validates the magical dimension in which we all live—the dimension that is energized by the unseen much more than what is seen. Biodynamic agriculture’s gift of life to soil, food, and people shreds the materialistic paradigm and, in its place offers something numinously profound.

1. Puja fire ceremonies honor the Divine and release to the flames what is no longer needed in order to create space for new ideas, impulses, forces for Life.

2. Hawthorne Valley Farm is a 400-acre Demeter-certified biodynamic farm in Ghent, NY, in operation since 1972.

3. Woofers are “Workers on Organic Farms,” a way young people travel the globe while working for organic farms in trade for room and board.