Workshop Culture and Community Education – Cultivating Living Knowledge

What Is Workshop Culture in Biodynamics?

At JPI workshops, participants begin with practical work. Stewart Lundy describes how understanding grows from that experience:

At JPI workshops, we start with practical experience, which provokes an inner feeling, and only eventually—with enough practice and reflection—does it become intellectualized.
– Stewart Lundy, From Hand to Heart to Head, JPI Substack, April 2024.

Practical Skills and Preparation Making

Making preparations is part of this approach. In his account of a JPI workshop, Lundy describes the work:

We undertook hands-on preparation-making focusing on 500 horn manure, Barrel Compound (BC), and burying the preparations we hung up in spring.
– Stewart Lundy, Making Biodynamic Preparations, JPI Substack, October 2023.

Community and Ethical Engagement

Workshops bring growers together to exchange experience. Nick Franceschelli describes preparation work as a process that continues over time:

The biodynamic preparations are, in a sense, a living, dynamic process, a system that extends through time.
– Nick Franceschelli, Reflections on Working With the Preparations, JPI Substack, March 2025.

Making preparations together offers a starting point for that continuing work—and for shared stewardship.