New Frontiers in Biodynamics

Originally published 2025-09-05. By Stewart Kahn Lundy, Natalie McGill, JPI Biodynamics.

join us for our fall 2025 biodynamic preparation making workshop!

“Books beget books, but the study of living primordial laws is pleasing to the mind that can grasp the simple, disentangle the complex, and bring light into darkness.” - Goethe as quoted in Conversations with Goethe, pp. 362-363

Hello, everyone! We'd like to cordially invite you to our 2025 Josephine Porter Institute Fall Biodynamic Workshop here at Perennial Roots Farm between the waters in Accomac, Virginia, where we will bury preparations we made this spring as well as empty two thousand horns (only to refill them with you!).

For those of you who can’t join us at one of our in person workshops, we’d like to let you know that there are so many other ways to support us. We would like to thank those of you who support us here on Substack. Your contribution may seem small, but together that contribution along with hundreds of others, has empowered the Josephine Porter Institute to expand our work, improve preparation quality, and donate biodynamic preparations to worthy causes. We can’t do this without you and every little bit counts!

Here on the farm, our fall preparation making workshop tends to be a highlight of the season. The weather is usually delightfully mild in October, with the farm winding down for the season welcoming a slower pace after a very busy spring and summer. You can look forward to chats around the fire pit in the evening and a farm tour featuring our cows who are the real star of the show in any biodynamic operation. Be prepared to get your hands dirty, touch grass and play with cow poop as we work on developing a personal relationship with manure.

The practical experience of making biodynamic preparations is transformative, but the food from a biodynamic farm speaks to the etheric body in a way that making and doing do not. When you eat from the land on which you are working, everything is aligned. The astral body is engaged in willing ourselves through the work and imagining what on earth these strange remedies might mean. Meanwhile, food supplied right from this biodynamic farm nourishes the etheric body with the quiet answer to the questions we pose. The experience of eating from the land while making preparations with herbs and sheaths grown on the same soil is a uniquely intimate experience for all involved and yet another foundational building block toward working in community together. Even if nothing else was accomplished than gathering together, it’s worth the experience alone.

We have been using biodynamic preparations on our farm since 2012 and this workshop is one of gathering together in fellowship and community to make gifts for the earth. From 2012 to 2019, I journeyed to Hugh Courtney’s gatherings each autumn, and now continue the work on my own farm. As Hugh liked to say, “Biodynamics is not an intellectual path, it is a path of the will.” But what does this mean? It means that those who go out of their way to do the work, even when it’s inconvenient, are the ones sharing our path. A librarian like JPI’s founder, Hugh Courtney, was obviously a big reader, so he understood the ideas undergirding biodynamics. Nonetheless, he knew it was not enough to know “about” biodynamics; we must participate with our own two hands. It does not matter how many cookbooks I read if I don’t practice cooking consistently. If we mistake biodynamics for a formulaic recipe, we have already fallen out of the “realm of the living” into fossilized thinking.

Register Now

Let me extend an invitation to all of you to join me in making preparations for The Josephine Porter Institute here at my farm in Accomac, Virginia, from October 16-19 (Thursday-Sunday). With manure donated from our beautiful Pineywood cows, we will make horn manure, as well as barrel compound that will go out across the world through the efforts of JPI.

Tickets are being sold on a sliding scale from $150 and up. Please pay what you can afford — doing so helps keep costs down for others. If you cannot attend, any support you can provide for the fall biodynamic work is greatly appreciated. Some friends are graciously purchasing tickets from afar and asking that they serve as a scholarship for those who wish to attend.

We are a small farm, so tickets are limited. Please sign up early to guarantee your spot! There will be presentations on the evolution of humanity and consciousness, the development of the cosmos, and the place of biodynamic preparations within this broader spiritual context. Thursday features a special pre-workshop work day where we will unearth last year’s buried horns, and Stewart will provide a lecture giving us context for the work and the weekend to come. For a full schedule, please go here.

Camping and local lodging are available. A work-comp option is also available for those who wish to receive a 50% refund of their ticket price after contributing a day of extra labor to help with cleaning up and making/burying preparations after the workshop.

When we began farming, it was a foolish idea. We had idyllic visions of unadulterated Nature and rather silly notions of working “with not against” Nature. Of course, in principle, these are lovely ideals – but no one said how much work it would be!

If we could tell our 20-something-year-old selves how much work farming was, I don’t know if we would have ever started, but that’s what being young is about, isn’t it? Aspiring towards ideals with no sense of reality and getting into all kinds of trouble you can’t possibly understand at the time.

It’s weird to farm these days. It’s weird enough to garden! While not everyone has access to land where they can grow food – and this is a shame – anyone who can should grow something, at least tomatoes. Why?

Because it’s all here in the plant. Sure, you can have big ideas or plans for the future or theories about the afterlife, but if you really stopped to study unfallen Nature in the plant in front of you, you’d have a key to unlock the entire world.

When Alan Chadwick got impatient during a lesson with Rudolf Steiner, Steiner bellowed, “Can’t you see I’m giving you a KEY?!” Origen is credited as saying that each word is both a key and a lock, but the key that opens a different lock. So it is with the entire universe. The whole is made up of smaller wholes, each of which has its secrets and can unlock another individuality. If this sounds cryptic, it’s just another way of saying: spend more time with plants.

But it doesn’t just mean sitting with them; it means studying them. It means treating the Book of Nature as a precious book, the lines of which must be read, read, and re-read. We must assume we always missed something and look again. We must assume there’s a context we’re missing – and seek it out. We have to read the footnotes under each phenomenon and never stay on the surface of how things affect me in their ephemeral way.

Drones. AI. Technocrats. Crypto. And here we are with dirt under our nails. Maybe they’ll go colonize Mars after all, but who will repair this world in the meantime? Our work can seem so small compared to the bigness of the Machine because it’s so easy to forget that the Machine requires ever more energy the bigger it gets, until one day there’s just not enough willpower to keep it running. But look at these plants: it doesn’t matter what you try to do! They grow beautifully again, and many of them are edible, offering us gifts of medicine and nourishment for the earth.

It is not hubris to say that biodynamics works with the fundamental laws undergirding the universe, the creative powers of Nature itself. If you really understood the significance of these humble preparations, you would drop to your knees in awe of what is entrusted to us – and in fear of those who wield these medicines. The knowledge necessary to heal is always also the knowledge of death—those who choose to heal know how to kill and choose life instead. This decision is born out of life itself, not machines or ones and zeroes.

In each plant, we see a lesson: each is born out of the invisible workings of the soil hidden from direct view, striving to overcome its inherited conditions to bask in the sun, crystallizing warm light into cool sugars, and then it surrenders its own being in the sacrifice of the flower as perennial openness to life and the future.

When we make the preparations, we are playing with the stuff of creation like toddlers playing with a comb. What a vast mystery life is! What a wonderful thing a tomato is! Have you forgotten what a treasure you yourself are?

The myth of depleting the earth places us in a constant state of agitation. Yes, the Machine is running out of resources. But what it doesn't consider useful, it ignores or destroys. People constantly talk about overpopulation, but a significant portion of the food people produce gets dumped into landfills. Moreover, John Jeavons and his exemplary Grow More Vegetables approach have decades of research demonstrating the sustainability of small-scale gardening.

Jeavons has demonstrated — and his results have been repeated worldwide — that you need a mere 2000 square feet to grow a complete year-round diet for a grown human being. Someone able to grow enough food for themselves and enough to share with others from limited resources is one of those rare glimpses at real additional productivity in the world. The most efficient worker on the farm isn't a tractor or a drone but a human being. Calorie in and focused energy expended, the human being outperforms machines in efficiency — the only downside is that our work requires real effort and willpower.

And that's what we practice at these workshops: developing willpower by doing things. We do not increase willpower without resistance any more than you build bigger muscles in a gym by ignoring weights. No one grows stronger by contemplating a gym membership! Similarly, no one grows a stronger will without doing things that aren’t necessarily easy.

So we invite you to sign up for our workshop, join us for good company and food, and spend time together making these precious biodynamic preparations in community together. We look forward to seeing you October 16-19 here in Accomac, Virginia to do the good work and learn through practice and action!

Register Now