1-29-10 **VIDEO INCLUDED**

The prayer Pauli performed prior to our departure



This morning we woke bright and early and immediately drove to Jeff's house. We asked him questions for over an hour about biodynamic farming and he lectured about Rudolf Steiner, who is the father of biodynamics. Steiner, an Austian scientist, with several PhDs, not only taught about scientific methods but also about spiritual practices. It was his belief that by combining scientific research with spiritual philosophies, humans could make tremendous progress on many fronts, particularly in agriculture. Steiner lived in the late 1800's and early 1900's and spent time with thinkers from the Far East, with whom he conversed about Buddhism, about vegetarianism, and about other previously foreign concepts to the western world. Toward the end of his life, he gave an 8 lecture series, which has come to be known as The Agriculture Course. In these lectures, he theorizes about ways to maximize crop production using biodynamic methods. Today, we helped Jeff with one of his biodynamic preparations.

We worked with a barrel compost, essentially aerating a mixture with shovels for one hour. We learned compost contains a mixture of water, nitrogen, and carbon. If you have a pile of food scraps or a pile of cow manure, you have mostly nitrogen. If you have a pile of leaves or saw dust or wood chips or bales of hay, you have mostly carbon. For compost to help provide nutrients to soil and assure healthy crop growth, there must exist a 25:1 ratio of carbon to nitrogen. To Jeff's compost mixture, which already contained egg shells for high calcium content and volcanic ash for high basalt content, we added six components: oak bark that had been inside a cow skull, chamomile, water diluted valerian, yarrow that was inside a deer bladder, stinging nettle, and dandelion. The compost mixture must now rest a few more months. Jeff will then use less than one cup of this compost, diluted with 3 gallons of water, and spread it over an entire acre of land. He's preparing several gallons of this compost to evenly cover his entire farm.

Jeff believes this mixture will prevent radiation damage in a nuclear disaster. In 1986, a nuclear accident occurred in the Ukraine and affected most of Eastern Europe, with extreme damage in Chernobyl. All the land was destroyed by radiation except spots of land which had high concentrations of both calcium and basalt. Biodynamic farming stipulates there must exist elements of earth, water, human, animal, plant, and the stars to be complete. We have lots more to learn.