Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1038/en

If one reaches into a compost heap that is at the beginning of the earthing phase, one holds in one's hands a dark brown to blackish substance still containing the last root, stem and leaf remnants colonized by microbes, and frequently knotted through in clumps by a great mass of the compost worms named above. The worms and other small creatures die off as soon as even the last remnant of organic residues has been digested and — in endogenous symbiosis with the intestinal bacteria — has become casting. This, as an etherically enlivened substance, is as it were impregnated with astral forces, which the digestive mass absorbed in its passage through the animal digestive tract. On one side, these bring about the transformation of nutritive humus into stable humus and rein in the microbes' breaking-down activity or redirect it altogether toward a building-up one. On the other side, it is the astral forces mediated by the animal that make possible the bonding with the clay minerals to form clay-humus complexes. One may, with full right, speak of an astralization, an ensoulment of the earth mound in this final phase. Everything shapes and individualizes itself organismi­cally into a unified whole.