Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/88/en

If one recognizes and appreciates the full import of the polarity between the conditions of production in industry — which spring from the spirit of the human being — and those in agriculture — which are inherent to nature — then, strictly speaking, no capital can be formed in agriculture. For what is expended of labour through the spiritual force of the human being upon nature does not congeal into a means of production that places itself alongside nature as the machine does; raw materials, energies, and laws of nature are not isolated from their natural context and recombined. The spiritual achievement consists, on the contrary, in thinking the concept of the self-enclosure of the organismic whole, and the labour-achievement in ordering the productive forces active in nature according to this concept and bringing them into reciprocal interaction. If an agricultural operation shapes itself faithfully to its conditions of production, it is a wholeness in perpetual becoming that includes the human being who acts within it and that reproduces itself in the course of the production process. Capital formation in agriculture, in the transferred sense of the word, must therefore be sought above all in a time-process — namely, in the preservation and development of the means of production: the cultivated soils, the cultivated plants, and the domestic animals in the context of the superordinate wholeness of the farm organism.