Biodynamic Digest #8

Originally published 2025-09-14. By Lloyd Nelson, Stewart Kahn Lundy, JPI Biodynamics.

watch out! the equinox is upon us!

With your friends Lloyd Nelson and Stewart Lundy

I can perceive now joyfully the autumn’s spirit waking
The winter will arouse in me the summer of the soul
- Rudolf Steiner

Autumnal Equinox

With the September 22 autumnal equinox followed by two beneficial astronomical planetary trines in Earth's constellations on the 23rd and 24th, get ready for an excellent time to supercharge your gardens with Biodynamics. Applications of biodynamic preparations at or near the equinox can vastly improve soil health and set your gardens up for future success. Utilize the biodynamic compost preparations to enhance nutrient availability and produce superior compost. Spray Barrel Compound or Horn Manure to help the soil better receive the gifts of winter, improve soil drainage, and increase humus. Don't forget to make and spray equisetum tea to enhance beneficial soil microbiology while getting rid of any detrimental fungus. This fall, you can use the newly improved Buffalo Soil Activator to give your garden a full spectrum of all the Biodynamic preparations and supercharge your garden. The word Biodynamic, just like the word farming can be used as a noun or a verb depending on context. Biodynamics can be used as an action verb!

Change is upon us

Fall is in the air, fruits are ripening, and the leaves are changing colors and starting to fall from the trees. The animals are fattening up for winter. Autumnal equinox, the moment that the entire earth receives equal hours of daylight, is an ideal time to activate the soil “to sense and perceive,” as Rudolf Steiner tells us.

For Biodynamics, this is one of the most “active” times of the year, the time when the earth begins to become “inwardly alive.” This is the opposite of the spring and summer when the Earth is most “outwardly alive.” The Earth recharges with potential energy in autumn and winter, and then releases that battery as kinetic energy in the unfolding growth of plants.

Buenas noches

We can think of autumn as the “evening” of the year, just as late afternoon is the “autumn” of each day. Microcosm, macrocosm. As we make horn manure by burying it in the “evening” of the year, we also spray it out over the land when it is the “autumn” of an individual day. When you stack these correspondences, you amplify their effect – so the best time to apply new fertility measures is an autumnal evening because this works with two “octaves” of the same cosmic tone.

In his Agriculture lectures, Steiner tells us of the great rhythmic breathing process occurring within the earth. At the autumn equinox, the change of seasons, the Earth starts to inhale. We experience this ourselves through the liturgy of the seasons: in spring and summer, colors emerge, flowers bloom, and sweet fruits ripen. We turn outside ourselves in an extraverted season of external activity. By autumn and winter, we turn back inward as the leaves fall off trees, the greenery retracts, and the external sense-perceptible world turns gray. This has a natural tendency to draw our attention inward during a more introverted season of the year.

Going Inward

As the Earth turns its energies inwards, this autumn of the year is one of the most critical times to use biodynamics to improve your soil's health. When you breathe, there is an inbreath and an outbreath, but between each, there is a subtle pause. When we stir biodynamic preparations, we form a vortex in one direction, and then we change directions – that chaos between two vortices is this moment of equilibrium. In the northern hemisphere, the clockwise vortex is the exhaling gesture of spring and summer, the counterclockwise vortex is the inbreathing movement of autumn and winter. At the depth of these vortices, we have a microcosmic image of the solstices, and at both “chaos” points when things are changing directions, we have the equinoxes. The pause between changing directions is a moment of homeostasis, where the equilibrium is in perfect balance. The heat of the summer has started to dissipate at the equinox, as the shift towards winter approaches. What we do at the equinoxes determines much of what will unfold next year. As Pfeiffer liked to remind us, problems in the orchard are often not from what we did wrong this year, but from the year before and even earlier. The beginning of the spiritual year starts now. Easter is only its flowering. How will you welcome it?

Simply Apply

A simple application of a biodynamic preparation can improve your soil's ability to receive the subtle light and song of the cosmos. We darken the earth so that it might be more receptive to these subtle bandwidths of energy. By giving such darkened manure to the soil, we make the plants more receptive to the sun, as the human eye must be dark inside to see light properly, so too with the earth. The composted medicinal herbs included in the biodynamic preparations offer specific kinds of darkness, each receptive to different types of “planetary light,” if you will. By giving plants the full range of these herbs, we help them photosynthesize sunlight, yes, but also moonlight – and maybe even the subtle streams flowing in from Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and even Saturn. The preparations make your land more sensitive and receptive.

Biodynamic preparations applied in the autumn significantly improve soil microbiology and help with better soil structure. These applications at this time of year will make for a better garden next year.

Boost it

The evolution of Biodynamic agriculture is inherent as it spreads throughout the world. Just as seed, plants, and animals continuously evolve from generation to generation, biodynamics evolves with every individual who takes up the practice. Every garden is different and unique to its locality. Biodynamics needs to develop regionally specific practices that are effective. Innovative approaches are required to carry the work forward. A small team of dedicated biodynamic practitioners has been working on numerous creative strategies to improve the efficacy and make the job a little easier and more accessible. To that end, we have developed an improved and easy-to-use preparation to boost your soil and plant health. This autumn will be an excellent time Biodynamically to activate your soil and gardens, and the biodynamic Buffalo Soil Activator is a quick way to do it!

Biodynamics – a little easier

A new, easy-to-use, all-in-one biodynamic remedy has been developed to specifically address the health, vitality, and fertility of North America: the Buffalo Soil Activator (BSA).

The foundations of biodynamic agriculture are rooted in a hundred-year practice that evolved out of central Europe. The impulse and indications Rudolph Steiner planted as fertilized seeds for further development of the method, and this work has spread to the far reaches of the globe. Have we, as Biodynamic practitioners, evolved our best practices, or are we working with a set of fixed rules that must be adhered to? Let us remember Steiners words in the agriculture course “the strange thing is that life in the Western hemisphere is something quite different than life in the Eastern Hemishpere. Life in Africa, Asia, and Europe has a totally different significance than life in America. So it is possible that horns from American cattle would have to be treated somewhat differently to make them effective.”

Break it Down

Let's simply start by looking at the word Bio, meaning life. Think biology. Next, add the life to the Dynamic. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of dynamic is:

dy·nam·ic / dīˈnamik/

adj. 1. (of a process or system) characterized by constant change, activity, or progress: a dynamic economy.

(of a person) positive in attitude and full of energy and new ideas

n. 1. a force that stimulates change or progress within a system or process: evaluation is part of the basic dynamic of the project.

By definition, biodynamic agriculture needs new germinal ideas, change, and progress to continue. Otherwise, we should just remove the “dynamic” part of the word! Imagine growing tomatoes in the garden – tomatoes that your grandmother once gave you – and refusing to save seeds, but instead only carefully sowing yet again some of the same old seeds. If you did this long enough, you’d run out of the original seeds, or the germinal force in those seeds would go stale. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” This is a bitter pill to swallow, but the form of biodynamics must die for it to live anew. If you do not allow an idea to evolve, grow, and adapt in new environments, we cannot expect biodynamics to flourish or thrive in diverse cultures and climates.

Planting seeds

Every year presents a new opportunity for growth and development. Each year, we can plant seeds and have a different expression of a plant from the previous generations. Factors such as available moisture, soil conditions, and the weather all contribute to slight changes in the plant itself. Similarly, each new season of biodynamics presents a new opportunity to make preparations anew, with each generation of preparations being adapted to current weather and soil conditions, and even to the individual who is making these preparations, as we are always in a state of constant evolution.

Lucky for us, early courageous biodynamic practitioners experimented, tested, and developed new ways of working with the Biodynamic preparations. Some of these new ways have been wholly adopted by biodynamic farms, such as Maria Thun's variously named preparation: Barrel Compost, Barrel Compound, or even Cow Pat Pit. With BC, Maria Thun has made biodynamics easier and more effective, and is recognized the world over as a straightforward way to influence the land with the benefits of BD compost preparations. Steiner gave some simple ideas to evolve the Biodynamic preparations for unique agricultural situations. When questioned, Steiner even goes as far as to indicate the possibility of using horse manure for producing the horn preparation, showing us that the opportunity for adaptation is definitely possible.

Innovators par excellence

When Biodynamics made it over to Australia, innovations had to be adopted because such a vast amount of land was converted to Biodynamics. Alex Podolinsky innovated a new way of making applications of preparations easier with “prepared 500” (or 500P). Inspired by a line in which Steiner says, “and to the manure we add…” and thereafter proceeds to articulate all the compost preparations, Podolinsky adds all the compost preparations plus valerian to a beautiful finished BD 500. The result is a remedy that can bring the full benefit of the biodynamic arsenal to large areas where composting is impractical. More recently, the Australians have developed a potent product to make Biodynamics even easier and more accessible: the Biodynamic Soil Activator.

Wise to Improvise

Now, if you want to innovate and improve your Biodynamic practices, what might you do? Hugh Courtney had a whole host of ideas on this topic. He would have us spend hours stirring manure or dynamizing remedies with a porcelain mortar and pestle. It always seemed he wanted us to do much of the hard work up front, to make it easier when it came time to do an application of a biodynamic preparation. Many of us remember asking Hugh Courtney questions. More often than not, he’d offer that rather unsatisfactory answer: “Let me know what you find out!” For a while, some of us figured this was just deflection, but if you listened to enough conversations, sometimes you’d hear him give his opinion, just often not quite at the moment when you were asking for it! Hugh usually had conclusions that he’d reached from his own experience, but would regularly direct us back to experimenting for ourselves. It’s not enough to parrot someone else’s ideas – you have to test things yourself. This unsatisfying answer is essentially scientific. Most scientific studies, even ones that are decades long, end with “inconclusive results” or, at best, “merits further research.”

Did you know?

The only way to know something, really know something and not just Google it, is from experience. No amount of reading cookbooks will make you a good cook if you never practice cooking! You have to try it yourself. Yes, this experiential knowledge is limited, but it is the only real knowing. Everything else is hearsay. The right answer to almost every practical question is, “It depends!” But no one wants to hear this. We often prefer abstract, easy formulas so they don’t have to think for themselves or invest the willpower in practical experiments. But so much depends on climate, geology, the history of your particular piece of land, soil pH, weather, what you’re growing, and each individual person tending the land. It is almost impossible to give a pre-formed answer that applies to all situations without it being extremely barebones. The more universal a recommendation can be, the less content it will have.

Try it, you might like it

So get out there and try something. We all get little ideas of “what would happen if…” – today’s digest is to urge you to TRY one of those ideas and see what happens. Take photographs before, during, and after. Compare an area you treated versus a “control” where you did nothing special. Photograph all of it. Often, it’s hard to see if there are real results, so we try again. And even when there seem to be initially promising results, when we repeat the experiment (or someone else does), the results seem to evaporate into thin air. This is why repeatability is essential to even amateur biodynamic science. We have to be able to compare a treated area and an untreated area, and someone else needs to be able to replicate our results. What ideas are you having?

Don’t forget that ideas do not belong to us. As David Lynch famously said, ideas are like fish. A chef takes credit for preparing the fish, but never for the fish itself. Ideas are beings that approach us depending on our proclivities – and the size of the capacious space within our souls. The emptier they are, the greater an idea can visit us. But just because you are new to something doesn’t mean that you won’t catch a big fish! So what’s your idea? I know you have a good one.

Activating the Soil

One way biodynamic farmers can enhance their best practices is by following and learning from successful models. Where has biodynamics been most successful? What remains to be seen. One way to judge Biodynamic success is by the amount of acreage farmed biodynamically.

If we look across the globe, where more biodynamic preparations have been applied than in much of the rest of the world, we find Australia. We admire the Australians for their innovative and practical approaches to promoting biodynamics. Go Australia! The biodynamic world would do much good to pay more attention to the ways Australians have improved Biodynamics to make it more accessible to farms and farmers, particularly those with large acreages. Biodynamics is like a seed; the more you plant, the more it will grow. Biodynamics, when applied, sprouts a fertile future!

As the extraordinarily gifted and ecologically profound Australian singer and songwriter Xavier Rudd proclaims:

Germinating seed from the positive
Germinating deep inside my heart
And it will gnaw through the negatives
As it grows on

The Australians developed a unique product as an all-in-one biodynamic treatment for rejuvenating degraded soils. The biodynamic soil activator was quickly adopted and used in orchards, pastures, vegetable and fruit farms with excellent results.

To save time, money, and energy, developments with the biodynamic preparations are ongoing. If not, it would need to be placed in a retirement home! If Biodynamics is complicated, it will be less accessible.

Just stop for a second and ask yourself, would I do Biodynamics more if it were easier? Many will answer yes. Indeed, as one of the larger producers and applicators of biodynamic preparations in this country, I will affirm it's easier if you make it!

Can we do some of the “heavy lifting” ahead of time, to save time on the actual day you want to do the application? By prepotentizing in the initial production process, a significant amount of time can be saved, as the finished product only requires stirring for 15 minutes. Can we improve the application of biodynamic preparations to be able to get all the preps out in one pass? Usually, the Biodynamic preparations are applied individually, but also sometimes in tandem. We have been working and testing and have found some interesting solutions. We conversely found some proverbial “dead ends”, so we reflect and then explore a different path towards a positive outcome. We like innovations for improving the biodynamic method!

If you are spraying one or two acres, that is one thing, but when you start spraying one or two thousand acres, that's a whole other game.

This is where the time, labor, energy, and equipment all become significantly more important factors. The All-in-One biodynamic Buffalo Soil Activator can become an invaluable tool in the Biodynamic toolkit. It contains all the Biodynamic preparations, it is prepotentized so requires little stirring, and it activates the soil for a rapid biodynamic proliferation. What are you going to try out this month?

Expect more on this later this month!

In the meantime, go biodynamic – for LIFE!