Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/57/en

1. Despite all the magnificent insights into nature and the abundance of her manifestations, the human being today lives in an unprecedented, severed and emancipated relationship to her. The phenomena of the glory of creation lying plain before our eyes slip out of sight. This only becomes fully apparent when, out of the level of knowledge available to us today, one seeks to shape the piece of earth of a farm into a living wholeness. One notices: the concepts do not correspond to the reality into which one works. They are dead with respect to it, having relation only to the physical-inorganic. What one can do with these concepts is found a realm alongside nature — the realm of technologies. Through these, the human being threatens to exclude himself entirely from nature; he positions himself beside her as a spectator, steers from the outside, and is on the way to handing over his steering function entirely to an "intelligent," self-governing digital system. Through his world of concepts, he creates in himself — spiritually and soul-wise — and in the nature around him, a desert. He thirsts in it, and the question may begin to dawn: how might one's own thoughts be so enlivened that they do not remain merely dead images of the sense-perceptible, but become spirit-permeated, lived ideas that bear relationship to the essential being around us? What path of practice must one walk in thinking, feeling and willing in order to bridge, with full consciousness, the gulf between the experience of one's own being and nature — the world-being? Where are the people who strive for such an ideational capacity, where the many hands that, out of these ideas, wish to shape a piece of earth into a small universe, into the organism of a farm? To accomplish this is an artistic act — in a double sense: to become conscious of the spirit that has congealed into the work of art of nature, and out of this
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   spirit-imbued disposition to bring people together into communities of initiative that, out of their own strength, shape agricultural enterprises into works of art of a new, future-open kind. Wherever this happens, even in the most tentative beginnings, walls of civilisation fall.
2. Agriculture is being quite literally crushed by a flood of laws, ordinances, impositions, regulations, controls. This legal thicket ties itself ever more tightly and confusedly with each catastrophe that is triggered by misconduct in industrialised intensive cultivation (biocides) or in factory farming (e.g. BSE). This compulsion toward an overflowing bureaucratism — which then affects everyone — stifles the individual initiative to work in a rights-forming way. It does not allow trust — the spiritual substance of the right lived from person to person — to arise at all. One has only oneself in view, and lives past the other. Rights become a kind of "technology of guardianship." If it succeeds, however, to awaken in a given place, through a jointly cultivated forming of ideas, the will toward action, then the sense of right receives nourishment. One learns to feel what is just in the concrete collaboration of a farm community — how the work articulates itself according to capacity, how the ownership of land and capital, income rights and rights of dwelling, and so forth, take form. Again a field of practice opens, now one of feeling, through which the community learns to build the social work of art in a more selfless, more trusting way. In steps of development it radiates outward and fills the sense of right among the people within the environs of a farm with life.
3. On the economic field, agriculture stands under the pressure of anonymous, price-dictating markets — a technology of calculating egoism. A capital requirement that is enormously high and, by its very nature, alien to agriculture — regarding the purchase of means of production (such as machinery, fertilizers, feedstuffs, plant and animal treatments, biocides, energy, and so forth) — forces it toward one-sided, environmentally burdensome mass production, which in turn cheapens prices, triggers displacement competition worldwide, furthers the globalisation of agricultural markets, and bears responsibility for famines in developing countries. Agriculture, dangling
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   on the leading-strings of capital interests, is estranged from itself; it is commercialised through and through. To find ways and means of breaking out of this imprisonment is today the greatest challenge facing every agricultural enterprise. These walls may be overcome when the farm associates itself economically, in the region, with processing, trade and the consuming public. Here a third field of practice opens — one directed wholly toward the future, in the social realm. The gaze widens beyond the farm's boundaries into the social surroundings. One seeks and finds the economic partners who are willing to place their economic activity in the service of an associative working-together and to orient it toward the well-being of all involved. The striving aim is to create, through the association, a work of art of "brotherhood" — beginning from the farm and extending through the regional frame among the economic partners. It is the art of learning, in community, in the cultivation of a common sense, to think the economic facts imaginatively in their interconnections. This finds its expression in a culture of agreements of selfless dealing, in regard to regional needs-provision and the finding of a value-commensurate price.