Considera

History of Organic Farming in the United States

Before Organic: Ehrenfried Pfeiffer and Biodynamics in the United States
by Anneliese Abbott

Beginning in the 1950s, J.I. Rodale started writing historical accounts about how he started Organic Gardening magazine. He always told the same story—how he read Sir Albert Howard’s Agricultural Testament and started the organic movement in the United States. But in these accounts, Rodale left out an important part of the story. It turns out that biodynamic farming reached America before Howard’s Agricultural Testament was published—and that Rodale himself was influenced by biodynamics far more than he later acknowledged.

Biodynamic farming started in 1924, when Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture about agriculture in Koberwitz, Poland. Steiner was the founder of Anthroposophy—a “spiritual science” that rejected reductionism and materialism and emphasized a holistic, spiritual worldview. In his
Agricultural Course, Steiner applied anthroposophic spiritual principles to agriculture, but he passed away less than a year later. It was up to his followers to turn the “indications” he had given in his lectures into a practical system of farming. In 1928 they began using the phrase “biological-dynamic” (later shortened to “biodynamic”) to describe Steiner’s farming methods.

In 1938, Steiner’s disciple Ehrenfried Pfeiffer wrote the first book-length summary of biodynamic farming for a general, non-anthroposophic audience—Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening. While still coming from a holistic perspective, Pfeiffer’s book did not mention the more esoteric spiritual components of Steiner’s original lectures. Instead, it was packed with practical farming information, including an emphasis on maintaining soil fertility with manure and compost instead of chemical fertilizers.

From 1938 to 1942, many farmers who were not familiar with Anthroposophy read Pfeiffer’s book or took farming classes with him. They were worried about the terrible state of American agriculture, and they saw holistic, biodynamic farming as the only way to save and renew rural America. These non-anthroposophic “biodynamic” farmers included Luigi Ligutti, president of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, and Ralph Borsodi, founder of the School of Living in Suffern, New York.

J.I. Rodale met Ehrenfried Pfeiffer and read Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening before he launched the first issue of Organic Farming and Gardening magazine in 1942. In that first issue, he discussed biodynamics and the Indore Method as two equivalent composting systems and featured articles by both Ehrenfried Pfeiffer and Sir Albert Howard. Rodale also included significant quotations from Pfeiffer in his 1945 book Pay Dirt. But when Rodale wrote the first history of his magazine in the early 1950s, he didn’t mention Pfeiffer or the term “biodynamic.” He made it sound like his only influence had been Sir Albert Howard and that Rodale had been the first person to “import” organic farming from England.

What happened? I’ve heard from multiple sources that there was some kind of “falling out” between Rodale and Pfeiffer, assumedly in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Was that why Rodale failed to give Pfeiffer credit for his contributions to those early issues of his magazine? Was that why Rodale failed to even mention biodynamics in his histories? I hope that someday I will be able to answer those questions. But even if I can’t, there is one thing I know for sure—Pfeiffer’s version of biodynamic farming played a very important part in the early history of organic farming in the United States."

The Other Strand of Organic History: Why Biodynamics Is Important

I have a confession to make. In all of my earlier articles about the history of organic farming, I left out one critically important element—biodynamic farming.

I can admit now that it was a purposeful omission. Biodynamics had been dutifully mentioned in all of the secondary sources I read, but it was usually in a skeptical or even negative light. All these sources mentioned about biodynamic farming was that it included adding “preparations” to compost piles. Weird things like manure that was buried in a cow horn over the winter, or oak bark buried in a sheep skull in a swamp. Those were just two of the things that Rudolf Steiner mentioned in his very confusing and hard-to-read Agricultural Course, given in 1924.

Not wanting to ridicule something that I didn’t fully understand, I completely avoided writing about biodynamic farming for five years. I though it wasn’t very important, and the secondary sources I read seemed to support that idea. Organic farming, they argued, would have developed basically the same even if biodynamics had never existed.

But as much as I tried to ignore it, biodynamic farming kept coming up. Organic farmers kept mentioning it. I discovered that the phrase “community supported agriculture” was coined by the biodynamic community and that all of the first CSA farms in New York and Pennsylvania were biodynamic. I discovered that many of the earliest organic farmers in the United States—including Paul Keene, the founder of Walnut Acres—were biodynamic. Most importantly, I began to realize that even J.I. Rodale got the phrase “organic farming” from biodynamic leader Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, not from Sir Albert Howard. Far from being peripheral to organic history, biodynamics turned out to be right at the center.

Finally, in 2022, I interviewed my first biodynamic farmer—Jean-Paul Courtens. Jean-Paul attended a four-year biodynamic training school in the Netherlands and started one of the first CSAs in New York—managed with biodynamic methods. He explained that the coursework at the biodynamic training school was extremely practical. In the first year, they did intensive unit studies on topics like soil science, crop production, vegetable growing, and landscaping. The second year included a long apprenticeship on an existing biodynamic farm, the third year converted a farm to biodynamics, and the fourth year was more practical education.

The most surprising thing to me was that Jean-Paul said that he didn’t even read Rudolf Steiner’s Agricultural Course—the foundational text of biodynamics—until his third year. “They did shield us a little bit from getting too much into the weeds of the esoteric components of biodynamics,” he explained. “We were allowed to either immerse ourselves in the teaching of Steiner or ignore it altogether.”

Following that advice, I decided to skip Steiner’s Agricultural Course at first. I started with Ehrenfried Pfeiffer instead, found some secondary historical accounts that weren’t skeptical or derogatory, and read what biodynamic farmers wrote about their own history. After that, I was finally ready to read Steiner in his appropriate historical context. And what I discovered was that biodynamic farming did make an extremely important contribution to mainstream organic farming. It introduced the holistic concept of the farm as an organism, an “organic whole.” And that’s where the word “organic” came from.