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ORGANIC AGRICULTURE - IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE? The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death to life. Without proper care for it we can have no human community, because without proper care for it we can have no life. There can be no denying that our
planet, positioned in the cosmos, is a living organism or being. Within this
powerful organism, it seems that death occurs for the good of life. We see by
following this cycle that we have a description of the fundamental biological
process. It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long
without seeing it is analogous to the life of the spirit. Because the soil is alive, various, intricate and because its processes yield more readily to imitation than to analysis, more readily to care than coercion, Agriculture can never be an exact science. There is an inescapable kinship between farming and art. For farming depends as much on character, devotion, imagination, freedom and a sense of structure as on plain knowledge or academia. It is a practical art. The word Agriculture, after all,
does not mean agri-science much less agri-business. It means "cultivation
of land". "Cultivation" is at the root of the sense born of
culture and cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in
"culture". It is only by understanding the cultural complexities and largeness of the concept of Agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments to our humanness implied by the term “agri-business”. If we corrupt Agriculture we corrupt culture. If Agriculture is acknowledged to have anything to do with culture then its study has to include people. But the agricultural “experts” ruled people out when they made their discipline or specialty or collection of specialties. Let's look at the biography of
Agriculture. We see that in the earliest times man was a hunter-gatherer. Later
he was led to know which plants and animals could be domesticated. Man felt
himself to be immersed in Nature - he was one with Nature. He looked to the
heavens for guidance - he was one with the heavens. Evolution took a leap
forward and so does man's consciousness. He separates himself from Nature and
sees the natural world "out there". Up to the 1840's man had known
that the plant was fed from the soil. It depended on the life of the soil. Humus
was known to reflect the health of the soil. Healthy, rich earth said to be
"of good heart" was a reflection of the presence of the humus in the
soil. Agricultural history reaches back into
the most distant past and is present at every stage of evolution of the History
of Man. A fundamental shift started to take place in the thinking of Man. Up to
the 1840's man knew he must nurture the life of the soil to maintain and improve
soil fertility. A German scientist/chemist, Liebig, wrote at this time a paper
called "Chemistry in its application to Agriculture and Physiology".
He studied the ashes of plants and came up with the now N P K theory of
Agriculture. But more importantly he too said that humus was not soluble in
water therefore it could not be 'feeding' the plant. This one paper has led to
modern Agriculture and its dissociation from Nature and its specialization into
micro sciences ensuring that the parts are more than the whole. This basic
misconception is the fundamental block in modern Agriculture. Life begets life. When one looks at the practices of
modern Agriculture one sees that they are working out of the mineral kingdom of
nature. This is a lifeless kingdom immersed in the physical. For a true sense of
Agriculture we need a balance, a natural occurring symbiosis between the four
kingdoms of nature. These are the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal
kingdom and
the kingdom of man. Life begetting life. The disadvantages of not being true to
the above is the situation we find ourselves in today. The lack of a true
cultural understanding that it is man's birthright to have access to food; that
it is a spiritual fact that man cannot own land but merely be a custodian for a
period of time; that the earth needs to be fed not the plant; that as with any
other organism if it is healthy it will have a natural resistance to pests and
disease. A healthy organism can only flourish if it is fed out of the living. It can only be sustained out of the living. The task of the farmer is to immerse himself as far as possible in this area. It seems an almost obvious solution that this can only be done out of what is described as Organic Agriculture. Fundamental to this is the direct
relationship between the health of the soil and the health of the people who
feed from it. This is known fact. There is a proven difference between food
grown conventionally and that, which is organically grown. There can be no doubt
that nutrition is the basis of any man. If we receive a healthier diet from
nature's way of growing would any sensible person not choose that way? Can man be so clever yet so unwise. There should be no doubt that the present way of Agriculture is bound to fail as it is not self-sustaining and is a materialistic way of working within nature. I end with the following quote: "So long as one feeds on food from an unhealthy soil, the spirit will lack the stamina to free itself from the prison of the body". (Rudolf Steiner) Alan Rosenberg. |
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