Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1009/en

In the residues of plants, in all that has not become seed but remained behind from it, there lie before us products of the spatiotemporal course of nature. In the composition of their materiality they still carry within them traces of life and of the seed-force. They threaten to fall wholly into death, into mineralization. And that does happen, and must happen, since the plant requires dead mineral salts in order to awaken them to new life through the power of its etheric organisation. Only it should happen at the right time and in the right measure. Now nature has the power to slow this mineralization process, or even to halt it and redirect it toward something new. What then comes into being is humus. With the plant residues and the animal remnants that return to the earth and transform themselves into humus, the earth manures itself. It manures itself according to the maxim: life manures life. With humus formation there arises a substance-composition that alone deserves the name of being the most elementary manure in the household of nature.