Beyond resilience: Section for Agriculture compiles research results
In order to guarantee humanity‘s food supply we need plans for dealing with climate change, promoting biodiversity and improving soil fertility. Biodynamic agriculture works from multiple perspectives on a sustainable resilience by including the living world and the co-creating human being.
Solutions to problems fail if they repeatedly trigger new needs for action without actually dealing with the underlying causes. Although an overheated byre can be tackled with a sprinkler system for cows and you can breed drought-resistant cotton plants, a more straightforward solution would be to plant trees as natural shade systems and carbon stores to help the climate or to adapt farming strategies using other plants. “Biodynamic agriculture looks at the whole and develops a system which allows the different parts to become stronger”, says Lin Bautze from the Section for Agriculture at the Goetheanum. “This means that a system needs to be expanded and where possible fundamentally changed in order to enable sustainable agriculture.”
The Section for Agriculture is working on a number of projects to develop a sustainable view of resilience in agriculture. Biodynamic agriculture takes account of different dimensions and lifecycles in nature as well as the creative abilities of human beings. Principles like these allow criteria to be defined for a supportive approach to the living world which can be measured in food quality, nutritional value and vitality. There is documented evidence of this from biodynamic agriculture and related areas such as agroforestry, permaculture, agroecology and horticulture. The Section for Agriculture is currently compiling results and plans for healthy food systems from researchers and students and via farmers to processors for the research conference on biodynamic agriculture in summer 2021.
Conference Growing beyond resilience, International Conference on Biodynamic Research, 30 August to 2 September 2021, Royal Agricultural University, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, UK
English translation by Lynda Hephurn.
Image: Hand with soil (Photo: Philip Wilson).