Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1267/en

The consonance of the two named stages of manuring from enlivened and ensouled nature, under the guidance of the third — ideally borne human labour — is the inheritance of the Western-Christian agricultural culture. Now, where the wisdom-filled instincts of this inheritance are lost, the moral impulses in the practice of manuring must be won from a thinking intuitive beholding of the wisdom working hidden in nature. This is the expression of the macrocosm working out of the past. Nature itself provides for the ordering of substances in cow dung, in plant compost, and in the crystals of the earth. This ordering repeats itself according to the wisdom-laws of the cosmic past. When a salt crystal dissolves in water, evaporation brings forth again salt crystals of the same kind. From the seed of the chamomile there arises again a chamomile. Can this ordering of substances, congealed into a 'Work', be enlivened in such a way that it opens itself to the forces of a cosmos in the making? Is the Christian element of a future agriculture to be seen in this: that the ordering of substances, brought to its completion in macrocosmic evolution, can in future be transformed through the free deed of the human being? The central theme of Rudolf Steiner's Agriculture Course is the enlivening of the earth itself. Serving this aim are the two spray or field preparations already described — horn manure and horn silica. Now follows the sequence of the six compost or manure preparations, which, as additions to the plant and animal manures, are likewise applied in homoeopathic doses. Rudolf Steiner opens this sequence with the description of the yarrow preparation, in which the methodical-compositional theme sounds, as it were, in its fullness. For this reason it shall be described here more fully, using the yarrow preparation as the example. The deviations from the central theme in the making of the other preparations allow their individual character to emerge all the more distinctly.