Wednesday, September 12, 2012

What is Biodynamic Agriculture

Biodynamic unfolding is not one shot about the plant being cultivated, but about the entire ecosystem that the plant inhabits. Essentially, it involves growing crops in a closed loop system, where there are no additives from foreign sources. Picture a boundary strained around a splurge plantation - zot appearance of that boundary, no soil, no fertilizers, zip at all, gets too many within the boundaries. That way, the soil maintains its natural qualities and the at-home ends up growing as nature intended.

Actually, biodynamic farming has been around far longer than organic farming, but it ' s even-handed not a tag tete-a-tete that has been commonly used until we all started deriving that the synthetic pesticides and fertilizers have been harming us. Rudolf Steiner, an Australian philosopher, laid out the framework for biodynamic farming in the 1920 ' s, out of concern of the types of farming methods that were emerging from commercial farms. It ' s actually a problem that is affecting our planet in various ways. For example, let ' s take paper production, or lumber production. Naturally, trees would grow in an area and die in the same place and perhaps be struck by lightning and eventually return to the earth to nourish smaller plants and other trees... That ' s the natural cycle. But what we ' re doing now is cutting down trees and moving them to other places; they then live out their usefulness as paper or furniture and finally biodegrade at a landfill thousands of miles away from where they started. So the nutrients they would have contributed to the soil in their natural home are no longer replenishing the soil. What happens, then, to the trees that we have left alone to grow there? They ' re not getting the nutrients they need, and cannot survive.

This is the problem that biodynamic farming is trying to solve. Keep everything where it was and the cycle of nature will continue. Start shifting things around, and there ' s bound to be all kinds of trouble.

Steiner ' s approach was a bit more spiritual, contending that as human beings, we had lost touch with nature - we were not following what we were naturally meant to do. The end result, however, is the same - that a farm is an organism like any other, and if you keep drawing away from it, soon there will be nothing left.

So truly, the best type of farming is biodynamic. While the majority of food crops around the world are grown in an unsustainable manner, there are some crops such as biodynamic tea [http: / / www. wabiblo. ca / Fair - Trade - Organic - Tea / Green - Tea / Fair - Trade - Biodynamic - Darjeeling - Green - Green - Tea - 50g - p1094. html] that is starting to revolutionize farming and trade practices.