Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1191/en

Introducing the biodynamic preparations, Rudolf Steiner points to the fact that agriculture necessarily carries on «Raubbau» (predatory cultivation). With the commodity stream of primary production leaving the farm, the head pole and metabolic pole of the agricultural individuality become impoverished in substances and forces. The task of manuring is, in the first instance, to create an equilibrium here. With respect to substances and forces, this is accomplished by the manures of the first level, drawn from the enlivened nature of plants, and by those of the second level, drawn from the ensouled nature of animals. For those substances and forces that enliven the earth in a higher sense — forces that the human being requires as nourishment in the course of his spiritual-soul development — forces from the cosmos must become active, forces for which the earth must first be made receptive. To this end, new substance-compositions are needed that do not exist in nature as given: compositions capable of enlivening the lifeless being of matter and opening it once more to its spiritual origin. «Matter» — so runs the result of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual research — «is built up in the sense in which Christ has gradually arranged it.» This strictly law-governed ordering of substance confronts us as a result of evolution. In the natural sciences it is preeminently the subject matter of chemistry. The third level of manuring therefore concerns the creation of substance-and-force compositions that reach into the accomplished Work of the kingdoms of nature, extracting from it certain fruits of evolution and bringing these into new relationships with one another. Anthroposophical spiritual science points the way along which it lies within the freedom of the human being to connect with the evolutive working of Christ. In this we may perceive the meaning and significance of the biodynamic preparations. The methodical framework of their mode of preparation derives from the trichotomy of the human being — body, soul, and spirit — and from what, looked at in nature, are the Tria Principia of Paracelsus: Sal, Mercurius, and Sulphur, the mode of beholding of the medieval alchemists, which reaches back to ancient Mystery knowledge. This threefoldness-in-unity reappears in the modern era among the Rosicrucians, philosophically in Hegel as "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis," and in Goethe's way of beholding nature

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