Ueli Hurter confirmed as Executive Council member
The AGM on 31 October confirmed Ueli Hurter as a member of the General Anthroposophical Society’s Executive Council; he will continue to be co-leader of the Section for Agriculture. In his address and his written presentation to the AGM Ueli Hurter talked about his personal and professional path.
When one is asked to join the Executive Council and considers what Rudolf Steiner associated with this task, one would rather decline, because nothing in one’s own biography seems equal to that. If one then looks at what others are doing, one can say, “Ok, I can try to do that, too.”
Being Swiss – becoming a farmer
The Swiss have a mind of their own – and so have I. We Swiss have many mountains and we sit in our valleys. My mountain, Piz Lunghin, constitutes a triple watershed as its waters feed the rivers Po, Rhine and Danube, which flow to the Mediterranean, the North Sea and Black Sea respectively. The narrowness of the valley and of the mind are widening up. When the Swiss have to form a council, they do this ‘concordantly’ which means that all the relevant forces of society are represented in the council and there is consequently now opposition because all views are being considered within it.
Farming is something one is usually born into – but that was not the case with me. My father was an architect and my mother a nutritionist. I did not feel a deeper connection to the world of animals or plants, but to the landscape. That I went to a farm rather than to university after school had to do with the fact that I was looking for the greatest possible independence. Agriculture is original production – there are no suppliers but one works directly with nature’s productivity.
Working practically and out of one’s will still seems to me to be the most direct way to the reality of the world that one can also access intellectually. But why biodynamic farming? There is simply no other agricultural approach that works consistently out of the spirit. I did not know this spirit, but my search led me to accept it as a reality. At times in my biography, when decisions had to be made, there was something present in me that gradually revealed itself as anthroposophy. My wife Katrin Hofmann and I followed this path step by step.
I’ve spent hours and days on a tractor, was out in the open air. Someone who has driven tractors, milked cows and sowed seeds is now a member of the Executive Council? Well, I don’t step out of the spiritual world when I climb on my tractor. A cow weighs around 800 kilograms – an expression of earthly heaviness. In its metabolism the cow is light – it has heavenly buoyant forces and can just about hold on to the earth with its hooves. These are not two worlds: the physical and the spiritual cow are part of one and the same reality.
My farm is in L’Aubier near Neuchâtel (CH). Right now they are sowing winter seeds there. At the end of 2020 I will pass the management of the Ferme Fromagerie on into younger hands. This is a big step for a family with three children, who are still in education. I took on this responsibility in my 28th year, ten years after the foundation of L’Aubier, in 1989 – a step that marked the end of my learning and travelling years. After my Matura (A-Level exams) in Zurich (CH) I spent two years in the mountains, taking my first steps in farming, and asking myself: philosophy or agriculture? I decided to become a farmer – but have never given up entirely on philosophy. Later I spent three years on the Dottenfelderhof, a biodynamic farming community and training centre near Frankfurt (DE), where Ernst Becker and Manfred Klett were my teachers.
The farm is part of L’Aubier; being in charge of a part means being part of the overall management. L’Aubier includes the farm with a dairy, a restaurant, a shop, a hotel and a conference centre, and in town there are a café and guest house, intergenerational housing and a training centre. With every step in the development, we needed to create the foundations for this development, particularly the funding.
Committed to Demeter and Weleda
In the last ten years I have been co-leader, with Jean-Michel Florin, of the Section for Agriculture at the Goetheanum. During this time we have been able to help the biodynamic movement grow around the world. We see one of the Section’s main tasks in working on farming-related questions and challenges in a way that allows for inspirational spiritual-cultural and social-dialogic spaces to be created for as many people as possible. The inner certainty growing from this makes it possible for both individuals and the whole movement to form alliances; because the challenges in our field, which include climate change, world hunger, loss of land, food quality etc., are so huge that no one can master them alone.
From 1997 to 2010 I was president of the Swiss Demeter Association and I have been on the board of the International Association and Biodynamic Federation Demeter International since its inception. These are the international organizations that are responsible for the Demeter label. Since June 2019 I have been on the board of directors at Weleda and therefore co-responsible for the Weleda label. With Demeter and Weleda anthroposophy is fully present in the economic life – a presence that is important to me.
Ten years at the Goetheanum
In my time at the Goetheanum I was actively involved in forming the Goetheanum Leadership in 2012 and in organizing the Goetheanum World Conference in 2016. Establishing the Goetheanum Leadership has sustainably strengthened the cohesive forces among the leading individuals at the Goetheanum and consolidated the strength and will to organize a Goetheanum World Conference in the autumn of 2016 – with seven years to go until 2023. For many participants the conference constituted a turning point from a mission-conscious Goetheanum to a listening Goetheanum that lives as a ‘greater Goetheanum’ in every place on earth where people work out of the spirit of anthroposophy on real world concerns.
Sources: Address and written presentation