Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/199/en

From the power of consciousness of the Christianised intellectual or mind soul, the elements of pre-Christian agriculture are raised to a higher cultural level. In the village organism or individual farm, they enter into a mutually supportive interrelationship. This applies most obviously to the primordial opposition of arable farming and animal husbandry. The domestic animals are adapted in kind and number to the available fodder base. They supply the manure which, together with the three-field crop rotation—winter crop, spring-sown crop, and fallow—supported by ploughing that turns the soil, ensures an enduring, soil-born fertility. Everything stands in a reciprocal relationship in space and time: on the fallow rotation link—which means a year of rest for the soil—a wild growth of herbs, grasses, clover, etc., grows after a pass with the harrow in spring, which is grazed over the summer by sheep and cattle and manured in the process. Before being ploughed under and sown with the winter crop in autumn, this arable pasture additionally receives the manure from the stabling of the preceding autumn-winter period. In the second year stand the winter grains as the bread crop, which at the same time mainly supply the straw for bedding in the stable, and, in the third year, in 'depleting crop', stand the summer grains as well as legumes, linseed, flax, etc. The entire arable land is divided into roughly three equal areas, on which the crops stand side by side, each cultivated on one of the three sub-plots in succession at three-year intervals (Figure 2). The three-field system was, until modern times, the guarantor of a soil fertility that renewed itself from year to year, transcending the mere level of nature. The meadows, which provided the hay for winter feeding in the stable and thereby produced manure for the arable land, were called the 'mother of the arable land'.