Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/525/en

The foregoing considerations concerning this essential relationship can build a bridge toward an initial understanding of what Rudolf Steiner, with regard to the cow, calls the "I-disposition." Is it not this that incorporates the result of the "cosmic-qualitative analysis" into itself, and so imprints itself upon the cow dung as a fertilising force-source? Understood in this way, the cow dung carries outward «ein Ätherisch-Astralisches, das rechtmäßiger Weise im Bauch des Tieres ist», and through this fertilises the soils of the farm precincts. It is the "I-disposition," with the etheric-astral back-radiation from the uttermost periphery of the cow incorporated within it — back into the substance-stream of digestion — that lends cow dung its enduringly enlivening and formative fertilising force. The dung has the power to overcome what is inorganic in the earthy.