Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/438/en

degenerates into featureless monoculture and in many places into a disposal area for pig slurry, bound up with wide-ranging odour nuisance and climate-affecting emissions. Cheerless and disfigured, the farm's field precincts lie exposed — a mirror of the inhumanity visited upon animals in lifelong confinement on concrete slatted floors. It is in the human hand to see in the domestic animals either nothing more than bare economic utility, thereby estranging itself soullessly from itself, or to bring to unfoldment those instincts working out of the soul-nature for the good of the farm whole. In the domestic pig, an omnivore, these instincts are oriented toward an uncommonly diverse diet, carefully selected according to need: grass, hay, grain, fruit, vegetables, roots, worms, snails, wild and medicinal plants, wild fruit, and so on. All in all the pig is the ideal utiliser of leftovers in the farm organism and, alongside the hens, a therapist in the elimination of all manner of vermin. With its highly developed sense of smell, concentrated in the disc of the snout — the nose turned outward as it were and grown together with the upper lip — it seeks out its food sometimes on the surface, sometimes rooting beneath the earth. Summer and autumn grazing of grain stubble, cleared potato and field-vegetable plots, or cover crops takes them out onto the open fieldscape, satisfies their drive for movement, their insatiable curiosity, and sets no limits whatsoever to their love of rooting. Snuffling, their desire-nature works its way through the earth. At pasture, the rooting work can quickly become a harm through injury to the turf. This damage stays within bounds when sufficient pasture area with fresh, protein-rich growth is available — whereby light breaks in the sward can even become an advantage in terms of aeration and rejuvenation of the turf. Beyond that, seeds get carried across and with them a greater species diversity. In many places pasture keeping fails for reasons of cost or labour economics. Instead, out of practical experience there arise systems of stall-keeping that accommodate the living-out of behavioural instincts as far as possible through a varied environment: group formation, diversity of feed, kitchen and processing waste, green cuttings, feed remnants from the cattle barn and so on, opportunity for rooting, wallowing, rubbing, running space for movement,

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