What is Biodynamic Agriculture?

Aug 11
08:27

2009

Venk Prabhu

Venk Prabhu

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Biodynamic cultivation is not only 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 external sources. Picture a boundary drawn around a tea plantation - nothing outside of that boundary, no soil, no fertilizers, nothing at all, gets added within the boundaries. That way, the soil maintains its natural qualities and the tea ends up growing as nature intended.

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Actually,What is Biodynamic Agriculture? Articles biodynamic farming has been around far longer than organic farming, but it's just not a tag word that has been commonly used until we all started realizing 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's 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 shfting 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, and our aspiration is to bring you some divine teas from fair trade biodynamic farms around the globe.  For a small business like ours to be able to bring you our own brand of biodynamic fair trade tea is truly a trading revolution.

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