Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/238/en

In Central Europe the organism principle held out for a long time against this stormy development. Friedrich Aereboe (1865–1942), the founder of the modern science of agricultural farm management, describes around 1917 an agricultural operation as a coherent organic whole: «Ich [...] fasse das Landgut als ein untrennbares, organisches Ganzes auf und zeige, wie dieses Ganze unter dem wechselnden Einfluss äußerer und innerer Lebensbedingungen verschiedene Gestalt erhält und erhalten muss.» (I [...] conceive of the estate as an inseparable, organic whole and show how this whole acquires and must acquire different form under the changing influence of external and internal conditions of life.) He compares «die organische Wesensart der Landgutwirtschaft» (the organic essential nature of estate farming) regarding the articulation into branches of operation with the «Tierkörper, der Herz, Lunge, Leber und andere Organe hat» (animal body, which has heart, lung, liver, and other organs). Just as these — each according to its tasks — stand in relationship to the superordinate whole of the animal, so do the individual branches of agriculture stand in relationship to the wholeness of the farm organism. Aereboe grasps the economic relational nexus of an estate — as this had arisen out of intuitive-instinctive depths of consciousness — for the first time in clear, lucid thoughts. The web of relationships he found before him was for him an incontrovertible fact, one that was to be illuminated in thought and optimised accordingly in terms of farm economics. The fact itself — the being of the whole — he did not call into question.