Hugh Lovel

June 30, 1947 – August 25, 2020

Rereading some of the many long discursive posts that Hugh Lovel contributed to the online discussions at BdNow, I now hear these in his own unhurried southern US voice.

I experience them as a continuum with face-to-face discussions in which he would explore a point, bring his focus back to the room to look up slightly askance, possibly with a twitch of his inclined white moustache, to see if you were still following, and then press on to build it up further, and inevitably further still.

One might start discussing a particular ‘hungry’ soil and its analysis (including total as well as soluble mineral levels), meander leisurely but surely via boron levels and sap pressure, visible signs in and around the plants, and pause before going on to preparations and field broadcasters without any change in pace.

By him would probably be Shabari who let him do almost all the talking in the seminars, but once the formal part of an event was over the roles reversed with Hugh being cajoled along by Shabari at treble Hugh’s words per minute into sharing this anecdote or confirming her understanding: “Oh you tell them Hugh.” And he did tell us about his unconventional life-path tangential to institutional academia but covering the same ground and making it his own. He told us about cooking and drinking, growing ginger around the planet, wrangles with biodynamic officials, bobbing and weaving under and through regulations he didn’t respect in all areas of life and the trouble this brought him. Again I imagine that steady pace with the occasional throaty laugh as a long forgotten aspect of something came back to him.

This pace slowed latterly as his health deteriorated and he had, for instance, to be measured in his climb up the hill to the Goetheanum this February wearing the red sweater bought by Shabari so she could find him in a crowd. But the commitment to sharing his way of thinking and to instructing those interested does not seem to have faltered. Having avoided joining institutions how could he retire?

There remain the archives of BdNow and his books (A Biodynamic Farm and Quantum Agriculture) and the web site quantumagriculture.com with the fruit of Shabari’s untiring recording.

That legacy is a gateway into Hugh’s earthly work and I imagine nothing would please him more than people tuning in and trying to understand, and then getting down to work.