Summer 2023 JPI Farm Update
Originally published 2023-06-19. By Ben Nommay.
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New preparations, new calves born at the farm
Hi folks, it's almost the Summer Solstice! Days are long and the to-do list is ever-growing. The identification list of plants and the size of the nighttime orchestra is also growing!
We have been making compost with the manure from the cattle and debris from the garden to provide the basis of fertility for growing our own food and supplying the Pfeiffer Field and Garden Spray with necessary nourishment.
We had the first new life born on the farm — an adorable heifer calf. She has dappled spots on her front end and a white tail.
Image: mother cow with calf — life begets life
We have been bonding with the neighbors by sharing equipment and knowledge to unite our small community here in this idyllic valley in Floyd County, Virginia. Grazing the cattle on resting fields at Riverstone Organic to our south and Spikenard Honeybee Sanctuary fields to our north has provided diverse forage for the cattle. In return, the cattle provide nutrient-rich manure to their grounds, and have allowed our pasture to grow very thick. When the cows move off Riverstone’s area or Spikenard’s land, they bring a little of each with them and they give a bit of JPI to the others as well.
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As Karl König says in Earth and Man, cows create meadows. By their grazing activity, cows tend to encourage flowering plants that offer up nourishment not to the cows themselves but to the greater cosmos. Here we glimpse an inner kinship between cows and honeybees. Wherever a cow goes, it tends to have a bovine effect on the land. Human beings, at least at our best, have a humanizing effect on the landscape. The cows participate in transforming the land into something new, fruitful, and true.
A neighbor has offered to let us cut hay from his unused pasture. With an offer like that, JPI is now able to secure high-quality clean hay for our cattle and has access to a pasture on which we will be able to perform future biodynamic research.
Knowing we will save considerably on the cost of buying hay each year, we have purchased new-to-us hay equipment. This is a big step towards JPI providing our animals with nourishment from within our own resources. We are now able to collaborate with the neighboring operations to put up the hay together so we can cooperatively share some of the bounty.
We hosted a Spring workshop here on the farm where we had 15 attendees that came from all over the country – as far as California, Florida, Maine, and beyond!
Image: Attendees together at the end of our Spring 2023 Biodynamic Workshop
Everyone convened to have a hands-on learning experience of making some of the preparations. We generated a lot of love for each other and the earth that weekend that was put into the preparations that we created.
Image: Freshly made 503 Chamomile sausages at our Spring 2023 workshop
The preparations we crafted together are now hanging on the barn throughout the Summer. Those will be buried in the Autumn at our Fall workshop October 6-8. You don’t want to miss the Fall workshop where we will be assembling the other preparations for the year and picking up where we left off at our Spring workshop! The cycle continues for another year of growth.
Image: Ben hanging preparations according to Steiner’s handwritten notes which can be seen at the end of the Creeger-Gardner translation of the Agriculture Course.
Since the workshop, we pulverized quartz and buried 501 horn silica. This is probably one of the most neglected preparations. This preparation is about welcoming the dawn of new life and ushering in the future. As Ruskin says in Proserpina, “A flower is to the vegetable substance what a crystal is to the mineral.” What arises as coherent crystalline form out of the chaos of relatively dead matter is, in its way, the first suggestion of the potential for plant growth. As the “flower” of the mineral world, horn silica helps guide the mineral world into the dynamic forms of living plants. It should not be neglected.
Image: crushing quartz silica into fine flour takes time and will forces!
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Thank you to all those that have supported our mission to bring the biodynamic impulse to the entire world. Thanks to support from our readers and clients, the JPI farm is continuing towards the ideal of the self-sufficient farm organism. To put it simply, we couldn’t do this without you.
Josephine Porter Institute - Applied Biodynamics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
