Hocus pocus? Spirituality and soil care in biodynamic agriculture

Anna Pigott

doi:10.1177/2514848620970924

Abstract

In this article, I participate in efforts to re-imagine soils as lively, complex, more-than-human ecologies, by turning to the largely sidestepped subject of spirituality in agriculture. Spiritual knowledge practices rarely sit comfortably alongside technoscientific, productivist accounts of soil health, and yet they can re-configure how soils are conceptualised and managed, with implications for relationships of care. Drawing on an extended period of learning with a Community Supported Agriculture project in south Wales, the article explores how care is cultivated through a non-conventional method of farming known as biodynamics, which incorporates astrological and spiritual principles. I suggest that biodynamic narratives and rituals encourage attentiveness to more-than-human agency and energy, to depth (not only underground but also above-ground influences of the air and celestial bodies), and to reciprocity between soil biota and humans. Biodynamic practices also make space for mystery, thereby resisting drives to measure and map, and offering possibilities for disrupting anthropocentric approaches to soil care. However, the example presented here also highlights how, despite biodynamic’s growing popularity, its spiritual elements have a tendency to be kept quiet, their presence sidelined by more familiar, secular, narratives. Nonetheless, I contend that if effective soil care demands more diverse knowledge practices than those that are currently obliterating critical soil communities at an alarming rate, then there can be much to learn from a touch of magic.

Highlights

The importance of the Earth’s soils, and the peril they are in, can hardly be overstated
A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report finds that soil is being lost more than 100 times faster than it is being formed in ploughed areas, and 10–20 times faster even in non-ploughed fields (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2019)
A Cae Tan fundraising campaign in 2015 emphasised this ‘big picture’ sense of belonging and care: If you want a different kind of agriculture that cares for the soil, and cares for what goes into our crops, we need the community to make that happen. [ . . . ] If we look after our soils, the soil’s going to grow healthy plants and those plants are going to be rich in nutrients, and going to give us the nutrition we need

Summary

Introduction

The importance of the Earth’s soils, and the peril they are in, can hardly be overstated. Krzywoszynska, 2019; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Recent work has begun to explore ways of knowing and caring for soils that are ordinarily obscured by the kinds of logics, relationships and temporalities that prevail in intensive and extensive agricultural practices (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015), with examples from conventional farming settings (Krzywoszynska, 2019), community gardens (Pitt, 2018) and permaculture practices (Jones, 2019). Attentiveness has been suggested as a potential mode of generating care-full relations with soil biota, by cultivating skills for paying attention and meaningfully responding (Van Dooren et al, 2016: 6). Questions of precisely how attentiveness arises and how it works to generate ethical relations with more-than-human others open up rich areas of inquiry I contribute to such explorations by turning my attention to spiritual practices associated with biodynamics, a form of organic agriculture that was developed by Rudolf Steiner in the early 20th-century

Objectives

Conclusion