Beyond resilience

The Goetheanum’s Section for Agriculture compiles research results on sustainable resilience for its 2021 Science Conference.

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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.

There is documented evidence of a supportive approach to the living world in 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.

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